I'd like to see a remake of 440BX + 1 GHz Pentium 3 with a modern die-shrink to minimize heat/power, solid caps only, with a slot for a 2.5" SSD and a fanless power supply that provides -5V for the ISA slot, in a small form factor except with room for a full-length ISA card. I suppose the basic version would omit the ISA slot and just include a Sound Blaster + XG synth combo on-board, and could then fit into a smaller box.

Edit: Oh yeah, also need on-board VGA with all standard modes and VESA BIOS Extension modes up to 1600x1200 and 1920x1080.
Edit: And 512 MB on-board RAM, full support for two joysticks (gameport or emulated from USB), a real case speaker ... and a reliable floppy drive.

Hardware based Wavetable\FM\SF PCI-E soundcard made by creative with support for all modern os, and not the downgrade the SB-Z series is.
Modern 25in-30in 4:3 LCD's with decent response times, and a native res of atleast 2048x1536.

- Quality and affordable CRTs that support HDMI inputs but aren't huge TVs. 4:3 ideally.
- A version of Windows 9x that supports SMP.
- Reproductions/re-release of various iconic cases from the 1990s and early 2000s from Cooler Master, Enermax, Lian-Li, Chieftec, etc.
- GeForce PCX 5800 Ultra. 😎

I like the idea of a retro line of CRT monitors. Something average, nothing fancy. 17" or 19" max.

A decent gamer PCI-X video card.

MS Sidewinder gameport/USB adaptor. I know there are homebrew kits out there but it would nice to have something official with modern drivers etc.

What retro computing gadget/board that doesn't currently exist would you like to have, if you could have any sort of gadget built? My vote would be for a combo RAM/EMS board or maybe vga/sound combo card that would be 8/16 bit switchable.

Switchable 8/16 EMS RAM boards exist.

There is an ET4000AX/SB Pro2 combo board as well, and I'm somewhat confident that could work in an 8-bit slot too.

- A secondary Voodoo 3 with DVI passthrough in PCI and PCIe 1x flavors

- An ISA USB 2.0 controller

- A PCI sound card with real OPL3, A3D emulation, full SBPro/16 emulation under DOS with no need for NMI, as well as the full SC-55 sample bank for General MIDI

- A VLB Voodoo 1 🤣

- A combination CRT VGA monitor/TV with selectable 15/31khz operation, support for NTSC/PAL, and inputs for everything from RF and composite, to full-blown RGB. Maybe even HDMI and a special "fake widescreen" mode with letterboxing. Max resolution in VGA/DVI/HDMI/component mode would be 1920x1440 😊 It would also have an auto-adjust feature similar to what many LCDs have.

- A kickass Pentium 3 gaming laptop with switchable onboard Voodoo 3/Geforce 4 Ti graphics, and an onboard version of my aforementioned sound card.

- An N64 with that stupid filtering disabled, and support for VGA/component/HDMI/DVI output. It would also have an insane cooling setup, and be overclocked to the point that it could comfortably do 4 players and 8 bots on Perfect Dark, at 30fps, with high-res enabled.

If I could only have one, it would probably be the CRT. I'd use it as the main hub of my battlestation. 😁 The sound card would be nice too, but there are practical alternatives.

I'd like to see a sound card that made use of 2 SID chips for midi synthesis that would sound rad. 🤣
Also yeah modern CRT would be nice, I'd also like to have some sort of all in one computer case like a TSR-80 Model 4 or even the computer integrated into a keyboard like the Amiga and Commodore 64's. 🤣
(And yes I know about the Amiga 500x case, but I was less than impressed)

I would also like to see a PROPER remake of the NES that actually is FULL compatibility with all NTSC games and PAL games (Because damnit I want to play the NES version of Elite! 😜 )

A wavetable daughterboard with DDR2 ram slot. Would have to handle pat sets and soundfonts with a custom ROM; perhaps loadable via usb or serial with power supply, when unmounted from sound card.

EDIT:
Oh yeah and I'd also like a composite capture card. Would have to have dual 30-bit ADC's, and quad SLI 10-line comb filters with past tence compensation; have to handle 240P content too.

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

- An ISA USB 2.0 controller

What to do with that? ISA bus does not even have bandwidth for ONE usb 2.0 port. Actually not even half of it! And remember that it is a shared bus between all the connected devices... 😜

Also, it actually exists http://www.simtec.co.uk/products/EB1161ISA/card-senw-sml.jpg but the drivers are for another discussion 😜

Gadget............can it be software?

Things we will never see eh? Probably a 4:3 aspect ratio OLED monitor that has perfect CRT emulation. Otherwise I'd love to see a Mini ITX (or smaller) Pentium III mobo (440BX) with integrated Sound Blaster 16 and Roland LAPC-1 chipsets. Extra points for mSATA support as IDE, and a BIOS level .ISO and floppy image loader via USB stick.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

What retro computing gadget/board that doesn't currently exist would you like to have, if you could have any sort of gadget built? My vote would be for a combo RAM/EMS board or maybe vga/sound combo card that would be 8/16 bit switchable.

Switchable 8/16 EMS RAM boards exist.

There is an ET4000AX/SB Pro2 combo board as well, and I'm somewhat confident that could work in an 8-bit slot too.

I guess I meant the vga/sound combo card would be 8/16 bit switchable, although I suppose most will function in either slot currently. I guess what I would really like to see would be a 1/2 or 3/4 length RAM card that you could popuplate with standard 30 pin simms and put 8 or 16mb into a system, although accessing that much RAM with an 8 bit data bus paired with a 16 bit cpu would probably be slow as heck.

laxdragon wrote:

Things we will never see eh? Probably a 4:3 aspect ratio OLED monitor that has perfect CRT emulation. Otherwise I'd love to see a Mini ITX (or smaller) Pentium III mobo (440BX) with integrated Sound Blaster 16 and Roland LAPC-1 chipsets. Extra points for mSATA support as IDE, and a BIOS level .ISO and floppy image loader via USB stick.

Well there is a definite possibility that some of the expansion card type stuff could be made, although it for sure would be limited production run type stuff and cost more than any of us would want to pay. Pretty sure a custom motherboard would be too difficult for hobbyist level construction. Likewise, custom cpus or die shrinks of existing types.

rgart wrote:

Gadget............can it be software?

Well, I suppose it could be software but I was thinking more along the lines of hardware.

obobskivich wrote:

- Quality and affordable CRTs that support HDMI inputs but aren't huge TVs. 4:3 ideally.

I don't mind huge 4:3 CRT, as long as it's totally flat. 😀

obobskivich wrote:

- A version of Windows 9x that supports SMP.

Same here. Imagine playing Falcon 4.0 in SMP without having to resort to Windows 2000.

An ISA FPGA card. For 16-bit socket, but with 8-bit compatibility.

For emulating whatever you like in hardware. Sound cards, video cards, with Flash memory for video/disk/network
BIOSes. It could have SD card or CF card slot as well, in addition to analog and digital audio and video outputs. And you guys just gave the idea it could have a socket for DDR memory to emulate EMS.

Does anyone know this kind of beast exists?

Nothing.... there is way to much stuff i want to have already that DOES exist!

PLEASE, don`t let them make more...... 🤣

How about a brand new quality 486 board using the UMC chipset with 1024k 10-15ns cache and onboard CPU/video/network/sound.

......and a bios option to switch between 33MHz, 133MHz and 200MHz 😀

Onboard Video: Matrox Mystique
Onboard Sound: Creative Sound Blaster 16, Roland Sound Canvas SC-55 and Roland MT-32 with a bios switch to switch between them.
Onboard Network: NE2000