A miniature 486 desktop PC running Lemmings

Tiny 3D Printed Gaming PC Contains Real Retro Hardware

May 6, 2023 by Robin Kearey 13 Comments

Emulators are easy and convenient, but for some retrocomputing enthusiasts nothing comes close to running classic software on actual era-appropriate hardware. This can become a problem, though, for those into vintage PC gaming: old PCs and their monitors are notoriously large and heavy, meaning that even a modest collection will quickly fill up a decent family home. There is a solution however, as [The Eric Experiment] demonstrates in his latest video. He designed and built a 3D-printed mini PC that runs on an actual 486 processor.

An ordinary desktop motherboard would have required a rather large case to begin with, so [Eric] started his project by buying an old industrial PC board. Such a device has the processor and all main motherboard components sitting on an ISA card, which then connects to other ISA cards through a backplane. This way, a complete system with expansion cards can be made way more compact than even the sleekest desktop PCs of the time. An SD-card-to-IDE converter makes for an extremely slim hard drive replacement, while a Gotek floppy emulator allows the system to boot as if there’s actually a floppy drive present.

A small 486 tower case being assembled — Even the side panels slide in exactly like they do on real PC cases.

All of this is pretty neat to begin with, but by far the most impressive parts of the Tiny 486 project are the enclosures that [Eric] designed for the PC and its accompanying monitor. Both were modelled off real-world examples and are accurate down to the smallest details: the tilting stand that clips onto the base of the monitor for instance, or the moving latch on the faux 5.25″ floppy drive. That latch operates a cleverly hidden door that reveals the USB connector for the floppy emulator. The compulsory seven-segment LED display on the mini tower’s front panel now finally serves a useful purpose – indicating which floppy image is currently active.

Sporting an Intel 486-DX4 100 MHz processor, 32 MB of RAM, a Tseng ET4000 video card and an ESS Audiodrive for sound, the tiny 486 can run DOS or Windows 95, although performance in the latter is a bit limited due to the lack of a local-bus video card. It’s perfectly fine for most DOS games though, and a lot more practical than a full-sized desktop PC.

There are several ways to make a tiny game PC, like using PC/104 standard boards or repurposing old network equipment. The crucial part needed to turn it into a gaming machine is a proper sound card, which you can even build from scratch if needed. Thanks for the tip, [Nathan]!

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A Custom Raspberry Pi Spotted In The Wild

July 3, 2021 by Jenny List 21 Comments

Since the first Raspberry Pi came to market back in 2012 there have been a variety of models released. Some of them are rarer than others, and unusual boards can even be rather sought-after. This one spotted at a Thai junk vendor won’t be in the hands of many collectors though, and investigating it sheds a bit of light on some of the most unusual boards from the company.

The board is recognisably very similar to a Pi 3 with a BCM2837 SoC, but despite all that it has no Pi logo. On the underside there is an eMMC in place of the SD socket, and one pair of USB sockets has been replaced by a micro USB socket and a header. The source is reported to have been a washing machine, but given that this SoC is exclusive to the the Pi Foundation there’s no way it could easily have been manufactured by anyone else. The answer comes in the 2015 launch of a customisation service for industrial customers, which allowed manufacturers to have their own versions made of the fruity SBC.

From the point of view of an experimenter this board offers nothing that a standard device can’t do. But it’s an interesting glimpse of an unseen side to the Pi story, and it holds the prospect of other special versions being unearthed. If you find one on your travels, let us know!

Old LED Marquee Turned Embedded Video Player

April 26, 2013 by Mike Szczys 12 Comments

driving-led-marquee-with-rpi

[Sprite_TM] is was sent an old LED Marquee by an anonymous fan of his hacking projects. The display isn’t full color, but it’s large — 224 by 48 pixels — and he figured he could render some okay images with the bi-color diodes. In the end, he replaced the controller and turned it into a video player.

The original system work well enough, but the 100 MHz 486 industrial style PC that drove the display seems a little comical these days. After giving it a spin and testing out how it drives the display [Sprite] hooked up an FTDI chip and managed to get it playing video from his computer. Above you can see part of the opening sequence of The Simpsons.

Now that he had learned its secrets he set out to give it an embedded controller. His first attempt was with a Carambola board which he’s worked with before. That proved to be a little slow for all the pixel data he was pushing so he upgraded to a Raspberry Pi and never looked back. You can see the demo video after the jump.

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