First post, by Gopher666
- Rank
- Newbie
Not too many PC 104 topics are floating around here, most likely cos most people still cannot afford them. Even for the old pos AMD 586, P133 modules sometimes they charge well over 600-800$. Kind of overkill for 20+ years old technology but let's get to the chase:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=5bm90hIJIgg
I looking for these machines from 2 perspectives:
1, The "most compatible", will run most retro OSes with full hardware support: Win9X/NT/2K/XP/Novell/Solaris/Linuxes etc.
So for this the most limiting factor I found is the embedded network card, some of them have some weird industrial ethernet which does not work with many OSes.
The second is booting issues, I use these all from the CF cards on them and some have weird setups like that shows up as SDB SDC so 2nd 3rd hdd which crap in many retro OSes.
2, The "most powerful" still can be used for retro purposes but you can run high end games on them like Quake3
Now for this the VGA (if there is any LoL) is the most limiting factor. Many of these PC104s are with these 500 Mhz AMD Geode processors are powerful enough to run the beforementioned retro OSes and many old games what it comes down to is the graphics card which is more often than not is dogeshit squared on these boards. Many doesn't even have any you need to buy the expensive external one for an additional 2000 euros 😁
What they do have is ISA/PCI ports so with an expansion card you can pretty much plug in anything PCI like good old Voodoo2 Voodoo3s.
I managed to get good results on some with the VBEM driver in 9x: https://bearwindows.zcm.com.au/vbe9x.htm
These were boards where the manufacturer didn't even provide 9x drivers anymore.
Feel free to share any experience with the PC104 boards you tried. Please keep the topic clean those who never owned/tried any don't comment. Huge advantage of these boards is many of them are completely silent, you don't need fan so they are zero noise, no mechanical hdd again because you use the CF, regardless that whether fully supported in hardware or not almost all retro OSes will run on them because they are X86 and the CF adapter == IDE and we there many can run with a 5V2A regular power adapter without needing a big bulky power supply.
