First post, by sirnephilim
So I'm in the middle of building a Xi 8088 (complete with BlasterBoard, XT-CF Lite, Gotek, and 8-bit ISA VGA card - the project is to build a fully working XT compatible system completely from parts and soldered by hand) and realized that old industrial SBCs might be an amazing way to get a huge amount of retro coverage into a single PC case.
Like, on a single backplane you can get 8 and 16-bit ISA, PCI and AGP. That would seem to indicate that with the right SBC cards and expansion cards you could go all the way from the 8088 through to the Pentium 4 era on the same backplane. (Maybe not, or maybe you'd at least need the -5V mod for older AT based systems if the boards required it?) That strikes me as a very interesting possibility - keep a pile of cards handy and you could quickly and easily swap out your hardware to match any era you wish between the original IBM PC DOS through to Windows XP. (I'm imagining a 3D printed storage system to hold the cards that aren't being used, like dummy ISA or AGP slots that hang on the wall.)
Pricing things out on the big auction site at it looks like prices for SBC CPU cards are comparable to normal motherboards, or even cheaper in the case of a Pentium Pro board I ended up buying - I had a Pentium Pro computer for a long time and it seemed to work with almost all DOS and Windows 95/98 games. (Oddly, 386 boards are the most expensive out of any I searched for.) So if it can work it would be amazing.
The only roadblock I can really see is that some industrial SBCs with onboard video might not be able to use an external video card.
I'm sure this has been tried before, but I've never heard of it. Any thoughts or recommendations?
