if you can run it at P1 levels as well as 286 then you'd expect whoever can engineer that, to engineer a 4mhz to 3ghz system 😜 i feel like that makes the most sense. cover it all, completely configurable.

i'd put my hand up for a motherboard with the cpu and ram integrated - to be able to choose in BIOS how much RAM is being presented at boot, choose CPU freq (and cpu instructions?). USB 2.0 with good legacy support and PS/2 or serial via some sort of break-out cable. Integrated RAM with timings that suit the cpu speed selected to maintain speed accuracy with those old systems (i dont know how possible that can be).

I'd expect it to have an on-board SB16 compatible sound card, 2D video that is good at all the hard-to-run DOS games (smooth scrollers and high res) but also keep an AGP slot, a PCI-E slot, 2 or 3 PCI slots and one or 2 ISA slots. This way it's either a small form factor dos PC without cards or a proper PC if someone want to install their own cards. choose your video card at startup via bios profiles or something. maybe have complete systems as profiles.

basically my pipe dream is that you get one PC that can play alley cat, wolf3d, doom, unreal, halflife 2 or crysis depending on the hardware you install.

i'd pay 2 grand for that.

All the above, in a wrist watch, with a motion stabilised, micro laser, MDA through 8K projector capable of 6ft display in daylight, with a week runtime between charges and neural impulse sensors so you can just keyboard, mouse or pad/stick in mid air.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-09-23, 01:27:

All the above, in a wrist watch, with a motion stabilised, micro laser, MDA through 8K projector capable of 6ft display in daylight, with a week runtime between charges and neural impulse sensors so you can just keyboard, mouse or pad/stick in mid air.

screen not good enough sorry dont want it

The Cyrix MediaGX was SoC like, I think.
Performance and feature wise, it was close to Pentium 90 to Pentium 233, depending on the model.
The MediaGX found its way into low-budget PCs and embedded devices, such as early internet set-up boxes (for TV sets) for people that didn't want to use a PC to surf the net of use e-mail.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaGX
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIh3gOSfkhI

https://m.blog.daum.net/tware/1105
http://www.daupara.de/surfstation/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO1SmyTeRTs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mZrMSzlCdI

Hmm, it's only been 3 months since the 11 Page Would you be interested in an x86-based alternative to the Raspberry Pi, optimized for retro gaming? thread came to an ignominious end.

That had more-or-less the same "I'm gonna get AMD/Intel to design me a custom x86 chip, then sell modernretro systems based upon it!" pie-in-the-sky proposal, which had no economic feasibility, and was generally not seen as a genuinely realistic prospect.

It's a nice sounding dream but I do not believe it solves anything sustainably, it simply creates a new type of system reliant upon bespoke hardware manufacturing, to kick the can down the road another decade.

AMD got the mediaGX, folded it into Geode and killed the whole line in 2019.

However, these are kinda sorta a fast 286 and might be available still http://www.amphus.com/chips/singlechip/330_01.asp

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2021-09-19, 18:39:

We now live in a time of retro consoles and such, where customized hardware is used to replicate (and improve) upon old gaming systems and the experience of playing old games. On the PC side, we really don't seem to have anything for classic x86

From the perspective of the PC as another gaming platform, I can understand why you'd see it as anomalous that the PC doesn't have an equivalent product. However, they really are apples and oranges.

The retro consoles target very clearly delineated hardware generations and in their production benefit from well-defined design goals. Manufacturers know what they need to make and customers know what they want to be made. As these threads continually show, no-one knows where to begin with the design of a retro-PC product nevermind the end point of the project. The NuXT actually got made because it knows what it needs to be, and consequently has to live with what it isn't (and no cheaper for it).

Don't know if the OP has seen the ZFx86 but it's the closest thing to this. It's based on the Cyrix 486DX4.
It has almost an entire 486 PC on a single chip, just add RAM (PC100 SDRAM).
ZF makes a reference board: http://www.zfmicro.com/zfx86_dsds.html
There is also an entire AT board: https://www.esapcsolutions.com/product/esa-in … hared-pci-slot/

I have the AT board. Presumably a similar board could be made with a better balance between ISA and PCI slots.
A more appropriate VGA chip such as ATI Rage XL (one of those eBay cards does work on my board) would be a good idea.
Memory performance is somewhat lackluster compared to a "real" 486, in particular there doesn't seem to be L2 cache and the PC100 for whatever reason doesn't make up for it. Re: The Ultimate 486 Benchmark Comparison
The IDE performance could be improved with a DOS driver.
It has a few quirks, for example the pins for PCI Bus Mastering and ISA DMA are reused, so you can't use a SB-compatible sound card and PCI Ethernet card together for example.
The board is also more expensive than buying pieces for a "real" 486 even from ebay and putting them together.
It's a fun board to play with. The BIOS is a more modern Phoenix one and a little slow to navigate. I wonder if ESA would sell more if they put them up with an online shopping cart for anyone to buy. If anyone calls them let me know if you have luck. I couldn't reach them last attempt but that was right at the beginning of pandemic.

I have an evaluation board that has PCI and ISA slots and uses an SOC which is essentially a fast 486 and uses PC100. Haven't really played with it much though.

Replica or improved add-on cards are okay
Now, motherboards? Let's pay 500€ for a replica of generic boards produced en-masse that can at most be found for 30€ if you're really looking at the high-end

HangarAte2nds! wrote on 2021-09-22, 23:23:

The main problem with emulators is there is no hardware to play with.

that's the advantage for most potential customers of an all in one retro pc along the same lines as 'retro consoles'

actually for most potential customers there is GOG and steam, so they don't even need an old machine or a retro pc

for the rest there's old hardware out there to play with

Why not ask for a pony too?

Everything listed mounted on a pony! On a monorail!

There's just way too much hardware variation, especially to 'correctly run' DOS games, for a single native hardware device to do this.

The 'practical' idea would be the 'MS-DOS PC Mini', much like the NES Classic or Genesis Mini. It's a 'powerful enough' single board computer, ARM or x86, running a really refined/configured version of DOSBox and a slick interface. We already have an up and coming Amiga 500 shaped min console in 2022 afterall.

If you want a super configurable system as far as speed goes there are such things as programmable clockgens.

https://www.renesas.com/us/en/products/clocks … rammable-clocks

There are other companies that make them as well.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2021-09-19, 18:39:

We now live in a time of retro consoles and such, where customized hardware is used to replicate (and improve) upon old gaming s […]
Show full quote

We now live in a time of retro consoles and such, where customized hardware is used to replicate (and improve) upon old gaming systems and the experience of playing old games. On the PC side, we really don't seem to have anything for classic x86, despite other architectures and systems having "new and improved" versions of old hardware and software. That being said, what if we did? And if we did, what if we also incorporated specific hardware advances, to offer a superior experience and better performance. Since we can now get custom x86 hardware, is this an option people would like to explore?

To give an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a hypothetical example....

A mini-tower design, with the following:

A custom, low-speed 32-bit Intel SOC, based on the older CPUs that powered Windows 9x and XP, but incorporating modern advancements in chip design such as multiple cores, with an integrated GPU and 4GB of on-chip system memory. This could also run Windows 3.1 in "Enhanced Mode" to allow for 4GB memory access. Intel is capable of making a chip like this, through their custom chip business division.

The mobo would have SATA and IDE ports for drives/flash storage, multiple PCI and ISA slots for vintage and neo-vintage retro cards, and use only HQ electrical components, because it should be hardware that lasts a long time.

Software would consist of FreeDOS and Windows 3.1-XP, with customized drivers and add-on software like dgVoodoo, to allow the broadest range of vintage software to be enjoyed.

Just spit-balling here. Any thoughts?

I mean, if you want something small. In this "Can it be done?! Should it be done?!" topic. Just look at TheRasteri´s videos right here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBsv-jRiIT8 (Mini MSDOS gaming PC - Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cXdWMOl8QE (Mini DOS Gaming PC Part 2 - CPU Upgrade + Benchmarks, Building Soundcard)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJEp4ZUG7BI (DK
Building EVEN SMALLER DOS gaming PC! - weeCee Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P1E2vjpcRo (TINY DOS gaming PC build guide - weeCee Part 2 )

And in that case, it could be done and it was done. Whether it should be done, is all up to you 😀 And I think it is magnificent 😀 I am definitely not one of the naysayers . This topic actually reminds me of an old / ancient forum thread about a modern 2D console. Which sadly got derailed by pessimism. So I say good luck, and count me in. If you could make a unit 😀 Cause I would love to have a unit 😀

WolverineDK wrote on 2021-09-25, 21:39:

I mean, if you want something small. In this "Can it be done?! Should it be done?!" topic. Just look at TheRasteri´s videos righ […]
Show full quote

I mean, if you want something small. In this "Can it be done?! Should it be done?!" topic. Just look at TheRasteri´s videos right here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBsv-jRiIT8 (Mini MSDOS gaming PC - Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6cXdWMOl8QE (Mini DOS Gaming PC Part 2 - CPU Upgrade + Benchmarks, Building Soundcard)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJEp4ZUG7BI (DK
Building EVEN SMALLER DOS gaming PC! - weeCee Part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P1E2vjpcRo (TINY DOS gaming PC build guide - weeCee Part 2 )

And in that case, it could be done and it was done. Whether it should be done, is all up to you 😀 And I think it is magnificent 😀 I am definitely not one of the naysayers . This topic actually reminds me of an old / ancient forum thread about a modern 2D console. Which sadly got derailed by pessimism. So I say good luck, and count me in. If you could make a unit 😀 Cause I would love to have a unit 😀

Rasteri has an active thread I linked early with his weeCee Vortex86 based PC. Tiny Vortex86-based DOS gaming PC - weeCee

It isn't an end-all-be-all solution, speed-sensitive 8088-486 games still run into the usual problems.

For much less you can get a new Celeron-based Mini PC with more than enough power to run any game under DOSBox, as well as supporting 3D games under Windows 9x.

It's an interesting experiment, but it's not in the same class as mini consoles. This is just an extremely niche project a handful of people might touch versus a mass-market product.

Every time one of these topics gets posted it's always let's target the 8088 through the XP era, that's over 20 years depending on what you consider the end of XP. Consoles were a static spec for 5-8ish years. Projects like NuXT are really the only way something like this could work, it's picking a target spec and developing something for that.

Yah gets an ATX case, yah sticks a hdmi converter and KVM ins the drive bay, yah installs an NuXT, a MISTer 486 and a VIA Epia mITX board all in the same case, with a Pi as an SMB file server if yah wants, and yah plays all youse games.

Seriously, I have really enjoyed TheRasteri´s videos. Indeed, it is not an end all be all kind of deal. I am well aware of that, but as TheRasteri mentioned, there are some bios settings, that can be configured. But what certain people forget, there are actually programs, such as moslo, and slomo. That can help along the way too. But it is negativity that kills all creative progress. If the "retro" and homebrew scene was the exact same way. Then there would not have been a fantastic MSX to Amiga conversion of the Metal Gear game for the Amiga by DJ Hoffman. https://hoffman.home.blog/metal-gear/

What if people wants to use the old DOS, whether it is MS-DOS, Freedos or for that matter DR-DOS. Cause sometimes it is actually fun, to get your hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of things. And not just "slap DOSBox on a celeron CPU computer and voilà, BOB´s your uncle". Yes I enjoy DOSBox sometimes too, for convenience sake. But if I had a small factor WEE86, or weeCee style at my telly, I would really enjoy it. Heck, even make it modular, that would be cool. Hell, I doubt, that neither the MiSTer FPGA or the MiSTer Multisystem (based on the MiSTer FPGA) would be a reality, if there had been so much negativity there.