pc

95 Articles

The PC OS That Would Have Blown Your Mind Back In 1984

August 11, 2026 by 59 Comments

As far as desktop microcomputers for mere mortals went in the first half of the 1980s, there was a sharp distinction between home computers such as the many 8-bit machines we regularly see here, and what you might call professional computers such as a CP/M word-processor or the earliest IBM PCs. These were conservative machines, boring even, with command line interfaces and mostly text-mode software.

When the middle of the decade saw the arrival of mass-market machines such as the Macintosh or the Amiga with their beautiful GUIs, a PC with DOS couldn’t yet compete. [Jggonz] then is over four decades late with the beautiful os8088, a fully-functional OS for 8088 IBM PCs and clones, with a very slick Mac-style GUI.

os8088 is a single-floppy OS that provides preemptive multitasking and fully loadable software alongside that GUI, unlike other similar projects we’ve seen it’s not an all-in-one compiled application that just looks like an OS. There’s a second floppy with a suite of software that would have been seriously impressive back in the day, with games, graphics, and demos. It’s a shame that this thing appeared in 2026 when there is little need of it.

You can try it for yourself either on real hardware, your own emulator, or even in an in-browser emulator. Sadly it’s not OS enough to fulfill the requirements for a Daily Drivers test drive, but it’s definitely fun to play with. Bonus, if you run it on a Book8088.

Block, Shmock — Just Pump Water Over The Chip

August 7, 2026 by 27 Comments

If you’re water cooling a PC, it’s generally accepted that you need some interface between the coolant and the chips — a water block of copper or aluminum that carries the heat-removing fluid. What if you just…didn’t? That’s what [TrashBench] asked with his direct water cooling experiment. Instead of integrated pump or copper water block, he just epoxied a 3D printed pipe fitting onto his bare GPU and CPU.

The results are interesting: while the directly-cooled GPU outperforms the professional system by a decent margin, the same technique fails when applied to the CPU. It also leaks and nearly ruins his hardware, but those are the risks you take when doing mad science, and it’s nothing more epoxy can’t fix. In any case, the fact that directly exposing chips to liquid can cool them down isn’t exactly a revelation. People have been dunking computers in oil for years, but the fact that he sees such a difference between CPU and GPU is quite interesting. [TrashBench] has his own theory in the video, but what do you think is going on here?

In any case, if he continues his direct cooling experiments he’s still going to need a radiator, and if we may be so bold, we would like to recommend a giant metal snake.

Continue reading “Block, Shmock — Just Pump Water Over The Chip” →

Restoring A 3DO Blaster Card From The Early 90s

May 15, 2026 by 12 Comments

Before the modern trifecta of video game giants came to dominate the market around two decades ago, the world was awash in video game consoles. Many of these retro platforms have largely been forgotten outside of the enthusiast communities, and an average gamer today might not have ever heard of brands like ColecoVision or TurboGrafx. Among these unusual, rare, or forgotten systems was the 3DO which wasn’t strictly a console but rather a specification that manufacturers could use to make consoles on their own. But even more unusual was that this standard could be used to build 3DO-compatible expansion cards for PCs as well.

In this video, [The Retro Collective] received one of these boards to add to their museum, but like much retro hardware of this era it wasn’t working exactly like it would have out-of-the-box. After adding it to one of their period-correct 386 machines of the time, they found that it would only work properly with weight applied at one of the corners. This led to the discovery of some disconnected pins on the PCB, and a repair of that and some other issues brought the card back to life again.

The video also discusses the platform itself and shows how it would connect to a PC from that time. The PC would have needed a Sound Blaster card, a CD ROM drive with a particular proprietary interface, and a few other hardware requirements, but with everything up and working the player would have a console that theoretically competed with the original Playstation or Nintendo 64. It also illustrates an alternative path video games might have taken where expansion cards added console compatibility to any modern PC, but unfortunately the 3DO never really caught on.

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Clone Wars: IBM Edition

January 14, 2026 by 52 Comments

If you search the Internet for “Clone Wars,” you’ll get a lot of Star Wars-related pages. But the original Clone Wars took place a long time ago in a galaxy much nearer to ours, and it has a lot to do with the computer you are probably using right now to read this. (Well, unless it is a Mac, something ARM-based, or an old retro-rig. I did say probably!)

IBM is a name that, for many years, was synonymous with computers, especially big mainframe computers. However, it didn’t start out that way. IBM originally made mechanical calculators and tabulating machines. That changed in 1952 with the IBM 701, IBM’s first computer that you’d recognize as a computer.

If you weren’t there, it is hard to understand how IBM dominated the computer market in the 1960s and 1970s. Sure, there were others like Univac, Honeywell, and Burroughs. But especially in the United States, IBM was the biggest fish in the pond. At one point, the computer market’s estimated worth was a bit more than $11 billion, and IBM’s five biggest competitors accounted for about $2 billion, with almost all of the rest going to IBM.

So it was somewhat surprising that IBM didn’t roll out the personal computer first, or at least very early. Even companies that made “small” computers for the day, like Digital Equipment Corporation or Data General, weren’t really expecting the truly personal computer. That push came from companies no one had heard of at the time, like MITS, SWTP, IMSAI, and Commodore. Continue reading “Clone Wars: IBM Edition” →

A Couple Of New DOS PCs Appear

November 23, 2025 by 97 Comments

An interesting trend over the last year or two has been the emergence of modern retrocomputer PCs, recreations of classic PC hardware from back in the day taking advantage of modern parts alongside the venerable processors. These machines are usually very well specified for a PC from the 1980s, and represent a credible way to run your DOS or early Windows software on something close to the original. [CNX Software] has news of a couple of new ones from the same manufacturer in China, one sporting a 386sx and the other claiming it can take either an 8088 or an 8086.

Both machines use the same see-through plastic case, screen, and keyboard, and there are plenty of pictures to examine the motherboard. There are even downloadable design files, which is an interesting development. They come with a removable though proprietary looking VGA card bearing a Tseng Labs ET4000, a CF card interface, a USB port which claims to support disk drives, a sound card, the usual array of ports, and an ISA expansion for which a dock is sold separately. The battery appears to be a LiPo pouch cell of some kind.

If you would like one they can be found through the usual channels for a not-outrageous price compared to similar machines. We can see the attraction, though maybe we’ll stick with an emulator for now. If you’d like to check out alternatives we’ve reported in the past on similar 8088 and 386sx computers.

FPGA Brings Antique Processor To Life

November 14, 2025 by 12 Comments

For the retro gaming enthusiast, nothing beats original hardware. The feel of the controllers and the exact timing of the original, non-emulated software provide a certain experience that’s difficult or impossible to replicate otherwise. To that end, [bit-hack] wanted to play the original EGA, 16-color version of The Secret of Monkey Island in a way that faithfully recreated the original and came up with this FPGA-based PC with a real NEC V20 powering it all.

The early 90s-style build is based on a low-power version of the V20 called the V20HL which makes it much easier to interface with a modern 3.3 V FPGA compared to the original 5 V chip. It’s still an IBM XT compatible PC though, with the FPGA tying together the retro processor to a 1 MB RAM module, a micro SD slot that acts as a hard disk drive, a digital-to-analog audio converter, and of course the PS/2 keyboard and mouse and VGA port. The mouse was one of the bigger challenges for [bit-hack] as original XT PCs of this era would have used a serial port instead.

With a custom PCB housed in a acrylic case, [bit-hack] has a modern looking recreation of an XT PC running an original processor and capable of using all of the period-correct peripherals that would have been used to play Monkey Island when it was first released.

FPGAs enable a ton of retrocomputing projects across a wide swath of platforms, and if you’re looking to get started the MiSTer FPGA project is a great resource.

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Building A DIY Ryzen-Based PC!

November 2, 2025 by 25 Comments

This project gives a whole new meaning to DIY PC. We don’t know how capable you were as a teenager, but could you have designed your own Ryzen-based mini PC?

Whilst making repairs to laptop internals, [Dominik Baroński] was busy taking notes. Modern super-integrated laptop PCs have reached the point where all the functions of a complete PC are embedded in a single chip. But it’s a big, complicated chip with very specific feeding and care needs. Once you’ve figured out what it needs, it ‘merely’ remains to supply it power, hook up some DDR4 RAM, PCIe storage, and some USB ports, and you’re away. It sounds easy when you say it like that, but do not underestimate how difficult it is to create such a board—or even to populate it by hand—yet that’s precisely what [Dominik] has achieved.

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