Reply 20 of 37, by foil_fresh
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.