Please, never change your background music. It‘s so comforting, like coming home to a time when things were alright. Maybe they weren‘t and I was just young, but who cares if it feels the same :)
The Vortex x86DX procesor is a pentium 1 based processor. Our company also use this processor in our traffic light controller as a application processor.
@@Amber57499 From what little I understand, many machines in industry use standards and software that are quite archaic. For instance, there are plenty of milling machines that are controlled by software that only works properly under win9x, so having a new computer based on old p5 or 486 based chips would be advantageous.
Thanks for the upload! I hope that everything keeps going smoothly for you Clint. You're a great person and it's always nice to see your calm and cozy uploads. * Edited to fix the word keep. Was half asleep.
It's neat, but $500 is very tough sell, especially without any 3D acceleration. At that point you're better off with an old thin client, with some even having PCI sound cards and 3D graphics (not very good 3D, but better than nothing). Phil's Computer Lab has good videos on turning old thin clients into Windows 98 machines.
DOS sound compatibility with PCI sound cards though... I dread it. Phil makes it seem like sunshine and rainbows, and let me tell you it aint. Got a bunch of old PCs with non-ISA chipsets (curse you Intel for dropping ISA support with the 8xx-series chipsets) and compatibility is an absolute nightmare. I love Dune 2, but that's a nightmare. Duke 3D can be a pain too. Got ES1938s, ALS4000s, Vortex 2s, CMI8738s, a bunch of different Sound Blaster PCI cards that all tout Sound Blaster Pro compatibility and yeeeah... in Real DOS that's really stretching the truth. The Vortex 2's built-in FM Synth is absolutely awful if nothing else... The ISA support and sound in this is a huge selling point for me (even if the Crystal chipset isn't exactly on my top 3 ISA list), but yeah, there are a few too many drawbacks for that price. The I/O issues and lack of 3D acceleration, and the weird issues the architecture and feature set can cause (like in POD), is definitely real bad. Should be possible to sort something out if there's a PCI and/or PCIe bus available - there are mobility chipsets that would probably work well. Worst case scenario with a PCIe to PCI bridge chip if there's no PCI bus available. But then you'd on the other hand add additional cost and complexity. :/
@@SylwesterGasiorowski-f7l For $10k I can get a second hand Ford Mustang that'll go faster than a Porsche 356, not seeing why anyone buy those. 😂 Same line of reasoning - for some, the genuine stuff is worth *a lot* more than a cheap copy, even if it in most cases, on paper, "outperforms" it.
I have a 2018 model Dell Wyse Zx0Q Thin Client with 2 x 9 pin com ports and a parallel port because it was used in some fast food chains that still use legacy connectors for their receipt printers and bump buttons. It also has a built in Radeon GPU which I have discovered is even quite capable of running the Dolphin emulator. I think this may be a specialised model as some of the ones I've seen on eBay and elsewhere don't have these ports. I was allowed to take this one home for free after the restaurant upgrade!
It's very nice that LGR is very transparent about partnerships, sendovers, and affiliates. It's nice to hear a TH-camr say that their words are fresh without company influence (not that it wasn't obvious with the good constructive criticism but still). I feel like this should be more of a standard in both Social Media but also in other media like TV.
This is more or less standard with channels of any repute and / or size, and if something looks funny there are hundreds / thousands of "commentary" channels ready to "call out" "bad actors." I wouldn't get too excited 👌
@Ichbaar I never had a computer that would skip the energy stay logo, it was just part of the bios telling anyone who knew that the motherboard was capable of soft power on and off, and could "sleep" instead of fully turning the computer off with a physical switch.
I'd be more into a version of this with a Pentium III and a 3D accelerator around the original GeForce's level. That was more my childhood. A lot of games from the XP days struggle on modern hardware almost as much as the DOS stuff.
Honestly, same. I'd even take Pentium II with 3D acceleration of some sort, but Pentium III would be a sweet spot before games got modern enough that newer, still easily found, computers can run the software easily enough.
@@fnjesusfreak Overpricing and greed at its best like situation with Factorio with its no discounts and high price all time. As for games I will buy another HDD/SSD than today AAA games.
For me, it majorly depends on how "engineered" something is and what the alternatives look like. For example: I was happy to pay $250 for my Model F77 keyboard since much of its makeup was a meticulous bespoke recreation process to revive a long-defunct physical keyboard mechanism, _and_ to do so with modern layouts and connectivity. Plus I got an earlier zinc-alloy case, so mine weighs as much as a collapsing star and thus is completely indestructible. Best quarter of a grand I've ever spent (though from what I've seen from others' accounts, quality and shipping control leave something to be desired). _This,_ however? From what I can see, it's much less bespoke, and there are much cheaper alternatives to achieve much the same end results in a fashion many would consider acceptably comparable, unless you're _extremely_ pressed for space in your setup and/or are relentlessly anal about the most minute inaccuracies.
Very nostalgic episode. I'm not sure if it was that exact monitor I had but I vividly remember my first PC monitor coming with a big rectangular power button like that. Good times.
Very nice. I recently got a MiSTer FPGA to run a 486 machine. It does other consoles and computers, but for me having what essentially a period correct PC for me, it's perfect. Even supports loading disk images via NFC. It was that or repurposing a thin client. Loads of options now for retro gaming on 'non-original' equipment.
Eivind and the Rasteri deserve quite a bit of credit for inspiring these designs. Eivind's designs are probably some of the coolest I've ever seen for these. people should real check them out!
Would be cool to see one additional upgraded model with some 3D acceleration chip on the custom PCB, just like how they did for the sound card. Having OpenGL support would make more games run more gooder.
From such a new retro PC I would expect Glide compatibility, which would require a Voodoo chipset. Most 3D accelerated games of that time ran best with Glide on a Voodoo card. I wouldn't settle for anything less.
@@Eyepatchfilms dgvoodoo1 will probably not work with DOS games that access directly a voodoo chipset. Therefore i would prefer voodoo or better VSA-100 compatibility on hardware level.
@@OpenGL4ever That's probably a lot harder to achieve than the x86 support. Is it possible? Of course, but the alternatives are... finding a real Voodoo compatible chip that is still manufactured (probably impossible), finding new old stock and designing a PCB for it (very difficult, limited quantities), or probably the realistic but technically hardest option, making a FPGA based emulator. I doubt it will ever happen.
@@OpenGL4ever DOS titles with direct Glide support are almost nonexistent and hard to get working even on real hardware if retro TH-cam is to be believed. GTA1 is one of the select few games that do it. Personally I don't remember ever trying to run any pure DOS stuff with Glide so I'll take their word for it.
Looks very nice... but the price! My worthless $2 is: if you want to play old games, you can get an old laptop for $50-$100. Throw in an SD card adapter and a VGA-to-HDMI adapter, and you're good to go for most DOS games, and a lot of later Windows games (3D notwithstanding, mileage may vary). Many manufacturers still have all the drivers on their websites, which makes life a lot easier.
Problem with old HW is generally gonna be caps and/or battery/-ies. If not recapped, you're likely to run into issues. And that can be both costly and a challenge for those without experience/training and equipment. :( And VGA-HDMI converters can be *real* trashy, especially the China stuff. Cheap ADC's with a bunch of weird scaling issues are commonplace.
I play a lot of old games and with a little Googling you can usually find forums or wiki pages that have complete tutorials for getting a game running on a modern system. Usually it’s messing with some game files or sometimes there’s even open source launchers to streamline the whole process (like with Rollercoaster Tycoon 2)!
You pretty much addressed every concern I had for this product. I very much _need_ that beeper speaker, and an activity light is definitely a must. That aside, this _is_ pretty neat. I once made a DOS box in the early 2000s, but this is far more convenient!
I imagine Clint asking Pixel about the fact that they sell Windows 98 SE with their machines, saying "That seems a little _unusual_ ..." and like in the movie Contact, the Pixel representative just says "It _is_ unusual, isn't it?" and just hangs up.
@@mattg7485 I want to believe they just found a thousand or so dusty OEM copies in a container somewhere around a company long since bankrupt, lost and forgotten. And bought at scrap weight price. 😅
I don't think I'd go for it at that price point. It looks nice, but I can think of a number of other things that I can do to get my nostalgic gaming fix.
@bobweiram6321 Right!? Dig it out of that sinkhole that was once grandpa's garage! Haha. Of course, I built a cheaper K6-2 system from old parts I found on ebay and elsewhere. Even found a new old-stock mobo. But, it was also PC Chips. So, there's some down sides. Lol.
@@bobweiram6321Are you sure that "free" computer would be of this size and with modern ports (especially SD reader)? Yeah, old one would probably have a floppy drive as a bonus, but tomatoes are still not really comparable to oranges.
@@watcherit1311 If size matters, run an emulator, Proxmox, or Rasberry Pi. Even old 8-bit machines work fine with SD readers. You can walk into any decent thrift store and walk out with free PCs because they usually pay to have them disposed of.
Cool idea, it's nice to see something like this show up for today's gamers to be able to almost painlessly sample yesteryear's PC space. I also find it kinda ... sus ... with MS products and warez so prominently featured. I hope that doesn't come back to bite them later. Another concern is connecting a Win98 machine to the modern internet ... probably not a wise idea. I agree that a device specifically marketed to retro enthusiasts needs to have a full compliment of retro connectivity - even if they just use one proprietary port with a splitter dongle having all the old ports (less desirable), but the best solution would be to include 1 9-pin serial, 1 parallel, 1 MIDI/Gameport, 2 PS/2, 1 Ethernet, 1 USB 2.0, 1 3.5mm rear speaker jack, 1 3.5mm front headphone jack, and 1 power connection. A dedicated power switch is highly desired, as well as a HDD LED to show storage access activity. Also on the front should be the power and reset buttons, and the storage media slot. I would also like to see some minimalist version of GNU+Linux available to order pre-installed - but that's just me being wishful ;) Overall I like the thing. I hope they do well enough to be able to afford dropping the price later which would perhaps attract more casual users who can't justify the current high cost of entry.
Unless one were to browse old cached web pages it's pretty pointless to connect win98 to the Internet since you can't really do anything with it as all browsers are decades out of date... Nothing will work. And I agree, a HDD access led would be a good addition. Even cooler would be an appropriately sized CF card slot so you can use an IBM Microdrive and have a real mini hard disk in your mini PC :)
that would be cool but a really hard ask. Maybe if these newly made retro computers become successful enough someone may be crazy enough to implement it eventually.
It is a 2mm most likely, seeing how the thing it is used in comes from Europe, which is also another good reason to call it such. Sorry, I can't help myself..
it's good to see something like the WeeCee coming into production and on sale. looking to get myself one of these, just need to find my PS/2 Keyboard and mouse, get a USB floppy and CD drive, and i'll be playing old school windows and DOS like no tomorrow
Great stuff, glad you're getting back to videos after the rough time with storms & everything else. These are cool, only gripe is not having a dedicated video chip but I know that'd cost more to implement. I still have an old retro Dell laptop with a 1.1Ghz P3, maxed 512MB memory, upgraded 80GB laptop drive & Nvidia GeForce2 Go video. Other than the screen being a little dim & re-pasting the CPU, it's a little beast & works great with an external LCD. Pretty sure I snagged in during a parts recycling run at an old job like 10 years ago, outside the hard drive being shot the only thing it needed was a new battery. This & my Thinkpad T61 are my go-to Win98 & XP retro gaming systems, they don't build laptops like they used to.
You hit an amazing cross-section of my high school and early college gaming favorites here! Need For Speed, Doom, Quake, Duke 3D, Carmaggedon, old-school GTA, Tomb Raider, Fallout, and was that Terminal Velocity near the end? Just missing Worms and Counterstrike!
I love the idea, but I just can't get over the price. I can pickup a Shuttle XPC with a low end AGP 3d card for under $100 with SATA / FDD support for native hardware / peripherals... Yes, I may have to replace a capacitor or battery, and yes- they are giant compared to this solution, but again, 4-5x cheaper and still widely available (no, you don't need a huge ATX box for native retro computing). In any case, I wish them best of luck and I look forward to seeing the ITX revision. The audience who want an all in one solution for this type of computing are almost certainly going to be able to tinker themselves or already run emulation, so it's neat, but I don't see the market being there to support it long term (which is probably why they are cross-linked to the warez sites).
shuttle XPCs had absolute rotten power supplies inside them, replacing them with anything good is hard, especially if you have an Athlon which requires strong 5v line. Sure you can find flimsy modern ones to fit, but nothing reliable for strong 5v rail.
@@lordwiadro83 Ah. I only had them with a terribly Compaq Presario iirc 5240, AMD K-6 of some sort. I miss the visuals I got through those boards, the Glide wrappers haven't satisfied me.
LGR gives off those old television vibes but with a modern flare just a guy talking what he's good at and honestly i have no clue about this stuff and what things do or don't it's just a nice think to watch and unwind to and the jazz in background defiantly adds to it
Among these improvements, why not make it in a few classic PC case look? Just in mini size? Like the C64 mini. Would look awesome, with working LED-s as stuff :)
I kind of want one. That era of gaming was my introduction to pc gaming. Diablo was my first western rpg lol my dad had a friend who had a bunch of old computers, then I was in scouts with a computer guy. Changed my life for the better.
As soon as you started discussing the internals of the DX model alarm bells starting ringing in my head "that sounds EXACTLY like the mini DOS computers TheRasteri has been making variants of for the past few years!" And sure enough, you mentioned the similarities moments later. It's a neat iteration, but considering the price they're charging it certainly seems like they could've taken some time to polish the I/O connections and layout
Happy New Year! It's nice that new products are coming up for the retro enthusiasts, but I agree with your criticism of this one. The price point is hefty too, considering you still need additional hardware on top of all that...
I wish retro projects like this didn't cost anywhere near this much, they'd be significantly more accessible for most people if they were. I'm sure a lot of the cost goes into making the chips that they run on, but in my personal experience something labeled "untested" on eBay has been cheaper in the long run. 86box is amazing for this reason because it's a free emulator that lets you customize a virtual system to what you need and have very little conflict despite it being emulation.
I wish it as well, but the fact is that the system-on-module is the expensive part, and they don't make those themselves. The Vortex86DX modules range (based on layout, memory and such) anywhere from about 200 USD to 600+ USD on the storefronts where I've seen them, because the buyers are industrial types, not consumers. Pixel x86 allows you to order the device without the SOM if you have one or want to source elsewhere, and you get 249€ off from the price, that's basically where all the money is.
If something like this ever comes out supporting up to the early 2000s era performance with GPU? Something like a Pentium III 1Ghz w/ Voodoo 3? I'd be all over that. It would cover everything from the Win9x era for me, and would snag one up in a heartbeat. Still, this is pretty cool to have native execution of this era's software, without emulation. Props to the Pixel guys. 🍻
Not styling it after an old PC was something of a missed opportunity. Sure, there are thousands of different case designs to choose from, but they were mostly pretty similar and they could pick and choose elements from a few different ones to give us something that was unmistakably ‘80s/‘90s.
Explains why they’re still in stock, indie projects like this are always out of stock by the time I see reviews. It doesn’t have OpenGL or 3DFx too. Not sure what this offers over virtualization, tbh.
You pay for the convenience and simplicity. It is niche yes, but you could say the same for many things that cost a lot of money. Most normal people aren't paying multiple-thousands for proper camera hardware for example.
These projects always waste time on unnecessary features and thus price themselves way out of the market they supposedly compete in. Original, (reliable even) hardware is still not so expensive as to warrant a 450 EUR replacement. Well known hardware combinations are plug and play. If you want original hardware, just build a Socket 775 or AM2 rig. With current prices, you can build a full system for like $40. C-media PCI sound card, next to nothing on eBay. Very low end ATI PCI graphics card (very high end indeed for 90s games), next to nothing. It will also give you great 3D and 2D acceleration. Core 2 Duo is the best choice for Intel because of the power efficiency and the ability to lower power consumption (so that you can have a silent PC and use little power). For AM2, use whatever you can get your hands on for around $0. Sometimes the BIOS lets you disable the L1 and L2 cache, which will at most give you i586 performance. With some tweaking you can get Wing Commander to run at an appropriate speed. For Intel, check out Phil's Computer Lab, he's got detailed guides for achieving this.
@@Photo0021300+ for wireless microphones for content creation. Nice audio is good😅 .And small numbers. Recently i was thinking of what it would cost if I made an RC car shell myself and price it realistically. A workhour would be about 150€ and if I say 10...... 😂 Make it yourself.
18:00 The ITX one make a lot of sense! Very neat. It's nice to see solutions to running older software. I was finally able to play my favorite recing game Outrun 2006 on a current gen PC thanks to a modder's project called OutRun2006Tweaks, but otherwise that game would have been a no-go unless I built something older.
If they could get that down to a more realistic price of like $150, it would be worth it for some people. But its current price is way too much for what it is.
Absolutely. I'm drowning in motherboards that need recapped and a couple of 3dfx cards i don't have anything to attach to rigt now. SOmething, anything, at about the £150 would be life changing
Great video... I have been waiting for someone to review these tiny PCs. They sound intriguing but I think I'm still going to wait just a bit for them to mature and maybe get a bit cheaper as well. ^^
It would be cool if the board had a CF card interface so you could throw an IBM microdrive in it and have a miniature hard drive in your miniature pc 😊
What I'd like to see is a handheld version of this. Like, an "MSDOS GameBoy" sort of concept, with an autoexec game launcher list program. Although control setup might be tricky, with different games using different keyboard input. The buttons would have to be remappable to keys on a per-game basis somehow.
Probably, the most user-friendliest option would be running Retroarch + Dosbox Pure in a modern PC-Handheld (ideally with touchpad and touchscreen like Steam Deck).
The DX is the same hardware :) Unfortunately the WeeCee is not something you can buy, but if you have the skills and resources you could build one for perhaps a bit less!
Yeah, this is just paying for continence. However you may just end up inconveniencing yourself in the end. Between the price and the lack of upgradability it's a dull product. This also would take out all the fun of building a retro pc in the first place.
For all those critical of its pricing, I would point out that this is new hardware so you cannot compare it to 2nd hand stuff from the era. But first and foremost, this is not intended for consumers. This thing is made to upgrade/replace all sorts of embedded systems from the 90's that exist in industrial roles where replacing them for something else is not an option, for whatever reason. There are control systems for huge industrial machines that run on old 486 class hardware that cannot be ported to newer hardware for myriad reasons. So, those kinds of customers are not sensitive to a price of a couple of hundred for an SoC module, which just for clarity is likely why this thing exists - if there were no customers to whom a relatively high price was zero issue, the whole thing would never have been made. So while I am not going to run out and buy one of these things, I do appreciate that there are those who make these sorts of things that make it possible to obtain relatively new hardware capable of running old applications. Retro gamers are not the market for these chips and never will be, because as a market it's nowhere remotely big enough for companies to invest the millions required to have this sort of chips fabricated. Us having access to these things is just a side effect of the need of big industrial players who would probably buy the things even if they cost $1000 a piece, since that is a very small price to pay to keep tens of millions worth of machinery running without the downtime and tens of thousands required to upgrade the whole system both hardware and software.
@@TheStevenWhitingI think he’s talking about the Vortex86, not the final product. Those alone being a couple hundred dollars apiece is what drives up the price of the finished product.
As Clint showed, the Vortex86DX struggles with 3D games like UT (released in 1999) but I wonder if the Vortex86DX3 would fare better? (even if it still has to run games in software mode)?
@lordwiadro83 well, that's what's I remembered from datasheet that I read back on a day. I doublechecked it and it seemes that there were more versions released. My bad.
...around $500 is kind of a hard pill to swallow for this, I mean, it's pretty awesome, if I had that kind of money to throw around I'd probably grab it.
It's a pretty niche product, looks well designed and sturdy... IDK, I wouldn't expect someone to manufacturer these at a loss. Seems reasonable imo, if cost is a major factor I'd wager one could build one for half the price, just my take.
Based on experience with Raspberry Pi, running an OS on an SD card is iffy in terms of the lifespan of those cards. You could boot one of these from an external drive but that boosts the cost even more. It’s not hard to back up these cards but that’s still extra work.
It'd be amazing to see a flavor of this idea as a brand new ATX or micro ATX motherboard with a few PCI, ISA and AGP if possible - maybe with the biggest compromise being soldered RAM only. Could add a 12VDC to -5VDC supply onto the board for ISA, and use the 24 pin ATX power connector. I hope the Mini ITX boards evolve into this someday!
I realize this is niche but does anyone remember the fps game Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green? Man, I’d kill to be able to play that. Genuinely think it’s worth a remaster for modern systems but I know that’s silly thinking. I know it was also for Xbox I think too. Next to Goldeneye, my favorite game as a kid, even though 007 was a bit earlier
I'd love to see a video comparing current modern emulation/virtualization options (86box, PCem, DOSBox, VMWare, etc) at some point. Especially would love to see how they can handle real peripherals (for those that support passthrough) and troublesome software.
My first thought is if some determined hackers might be able to figure out how to overclock the Mini version and turn it into more of the ultimate version. But at that price I don't see much of a following developing. The mITX version though looks cool, and that PCI slot is BEGGING for a Voodoo :)
"Things that should work just don't for some reason" sounds like a realistic recreation of old school computing.
That's my experience of computing before XP came out.
Check the dip switches.
Hahaha
it's a realistic recreation of computing, it didn't change
I'm crying laughing. Too true
Very glad to see you getting back in the swing of things.
Slowly but surely!
@@LGR Were you able to salvage much of your collection?
@@pleasebepatientihaveuwutis7179 Watch the videos dude. He goes into great detail on what he was able to salvage and what he wasn't...
@@pleasebepatientihaveuwutis7179 look at some videos from late last year about salvaging the collection. Should give you an idea.
@@LGR Don't call me Shirley.
Please, never change your background music. It‘s so comforting, like coming home to a time when things were alright. Maybe they weren‘t and I was just young, but who cares if it feels the same :)
The Vortex x86DX procesor is a pentium 1 based processor.
Our company also use this processor in our traffic light controller as a application processor.
Fascinating, I love hearing how those are used in the real world!
interesante ...
Is it because they're more reliable? I feel like way cheaper ARM SoCs could handle it as well, but I know nothing about this!
So can your company's traffic light controllers run Doom? Don't tell me you haven't tried! 😂
@@Amber57499 From what little I understand, many machines in industry use standards and software that are quite archaic. For instance, there are plenty of milling machines that are controlled by software that only works properly under win9x, so having a new computer based on old p5 or 486 based chips would be advantageous.
Thanks for the upload! I hope that everything keeps going smoothly for you Clint. You're a great person and it's always nice to see your calm and cozy uploads.
* Edited to fix the word keep. Was half asleep.
It's neat, but $500 is very tough sell, especially without any 3D acceleration. At that point you're better off with an old thin client, with some even having PCI sound cards and 3D graphics (not very good 3D, but better than nothing). Phil's Computer Lab has good videos on turning old thin clients into Windows 98 machines.
DOS sound compatibility with PCI sound cards though... I dread it. Phil makes it seem like sunshine and rainbows, and let me tell you it aint. Got a bunch of old PCs with non-ISA chipsets (curse you Intel for dropping ISA support with the 8xx-series chipsets) and compatibility is an absolute nightmare. I love Dune 2, but that's a nightmare. Duke 3D can be a pain too.
Got ES1938s, ALS4000s, Vortex 2s, CMI8738s, a bunch of different Sound Blaster PCI cards that all tout Sound Blaster Pro compatibility and yeeeah... in Real DOS that's really stretching the truth. The Vortex 2's built-in FM Synth is absolutely awful if nothing else...
The ISA support and sound in this is a huge selling point for me (even if the Crystal chipset isn't exactly on my top 3 ISA list), but yeah, there are a few too many drawbacks for that price. The I/O issues and lack of 3D acceleration, and the weird issues the architecture and feature set can cause (like in POD), is definitely real bad. Should be possible to sort something out if there's a PCI and/or PCIe bus available - there are mobility chipsets that would probably work well. Worst case scenario with a PCIe to PCI bridge chip if there's no PCI bus available. But then you'd on the other hand add additional cost and complexity. :/
For 500 bucks i can get some second hand i7 with 3060 pc and emulate Anything 😂 not seeing Why would anyone buy those ...
hp 5720 and hp t5710 are out of stock for a few years now, they were the best.
@@SylwesterGasiorowski-f7l For $10k I can get a second hand Ford Mustang that'll go faster than a Porsche 356, not seeing why anyone buy those. 😂
Same line of reasoning - for some, the genuine stuff is worth *a lot* more than a cheap copy, even if it in most cases, on paper, "outperforms" it.
I have a 2018 model Dell Wyse Zx0Q Thin Client with 2 x 9 pin com ports and a parallel port because it was used in some fast food chains that still use legacy connectors for their receipt printers and bump buttons. It also has a built in Radeon GPU which I have discovered is even quite capable of running the Dolphin emulator. I think this may be a specialised model as some of the ones I've seen on eBay and elsewhere don't have these ports. I was allowed to take this one home for free after the restaurant upgrade!
It's very nice that LGR is very transparent about partnerships, sendovers, and affiliates. It's nice to hear a TH-camr say that their words are fresh without company influence (not that it wasn't obvious with the good constructive criticism but still). I feel like this should be more of a standard in both Social Media but also in other media like TV.
Not without regulation it won't be
@@Lu-db1uf There's a whole Tom Scott video on that, ik.
This is more or less standard with channels of any repute and / or size, and if something looks funny there are hundreds / thousands of "commentary" channels ready to "call out" "bad actors."
I wouldn't get too excited 👌
Wish he added paid promotion in it so I would have not even clicked the video.
@@charliemartin-k7m what do you mean? Specifically?
Gotta say, the retro PC crowd make some of the coolest stuff.
Nerds at work.
Those new 3DFX Voodoo reproduction cards make me drool.
I wish there was that big ol' ENERGY STAR logo on boot up.
That was EVERYWHERE! True win98 era nostalgia
I'm just glad to still see the American Megatrends logo on the POST screen of my new computer, though their new logo just doesn't give the same vibe.
Holy shit. And it had a prompt that said "skip forever", well, it didn't skip forever. It was there forever. Never buying anything energy star.
@Ichbaar I never had a computer that would skip the energy stay logo, it was just part of the bios telling anyone who knew that the motherboard was capable of soft power on and off, and could "sleep" instead of fully turning the computer off with a physical switch.
I just say 86Box :D
This is really cool, been waiting for something like this, Thanks!
I'd be more into a version of this with a Pentium III and a 3D accelerator around the original GeForce's level. That was more my childhood. A lot of games from the XP days struggle on modern hardware almost as much as the DOS stuff.
Honestly, same. I'd even take Pentium II with 3D acceleration of some sort, but Pentium III would be a sweet spot before games got modern enough that newer, still easily found, computers can run the software easily enough.
@@drunkndisorderly83 Moreso old Windows games. A lot of my favorites from back then are a pain to get working right on my modern Ryzen box.
Wyse VX0 thin client, from 2007ish, it has full driver support for win98 and XP, and 3d acceleration(about circa 2000 Geforce 256 speeds)
windows xp era stuff is still VERY cheap
Same. Basically a good range speed for 2003/2004 XP PC I’d be all over it
every "retro" product nowadays is 3x what i would even consider paying
Entire PC's sometimes can be bought even for 100$ or less. That price is way too much, about 100$ or 80$ could be much better.
@@modernandretrogaming Yeah, I remember when $50 was a big ask for a 486DX2/50 lol
At that price ill consider buying a mac mini and running it all in emulation
@@fnjesusfreak Overpricing and greed at its best like situation with Factorio with its no discounts and high price all time. As for games I will buy another HDD/SSD than today AAA games.
For me, it majorly depends on how "engineered" something is and what the alternatives look like. For example: I was happy to pay $250 for my Model F77 keyboard since much of its makeup was a meticulous bespoke recreation process to revive a long-defunct physical keyboard mechanism, _and_ to do so with modern layouts and connectivity. Plus I got an earlier zinc-alloy case, so mine weighs as much as a collapsing star and thus is completely indestructible. Best quarter of a grand I've ever spent (though from what I've seen from others' accounts, quality and shipping control leave something to be desired).
_This,_ however? From what I can see, it's much less bespoke, and there are much cheaper alternatives to achieve much the same end results in a fashion many would consider acceptably comparable, unless you're _extremely_ pressed for space in your setup and/or are relentlessly anal about the most minute inaccuracies.
I'm very happy to see you're still going strong after the tragic loss of stuff after the storm
Thank you, I'm doing my best under the circumstances!
Stuff isn't important
@@Daimo83 Stuff can be very important, just not as important as life.
Very nostalgic episode. I'm not sure if it was that exact monitor I had but I vividly remember my first PC monitor coming with a big rectangular power button like that. Good times.
Very nice. I recently got a MiSTer FPGA to run a 486 machine. It does other consoles and computers, but for me having what essentially a period correct PC for me, it's perfect. Even supports loading disk images via NFC. It was that or repurposing a thin client. Loads of options now for retro gaming on 'non-original' equipment.
Recently got a MiSTer too and it's fantastic for anything up to N64. AmigaVision provides an easily accessible way to play Amiga games too!
Eivind and the Rasteri deserve quite a bit of credit for inspiring these designs. Eivind's designs are probably some of the coolest I've ever seen for these. people should real check them out!
Oh man. I still have my original SimCity 2000, SimTower, and POD disks. I really should build a retro PC to play them.
You can get simcity 2000 from gog with whatever support they offer for a lot cheaper
That's an amazing lockscreen image on your phone 😅 gave me a good chuckle
Would be cool to see one additional upgraded model with some 3D acceleration chip on the custom PCB, just like how they did for the sound card. Having OpenGL support would make more games run more gooder.
From such a new retro PC I would expect Glide compatibility, which would require a Voodoo chipset. Most 3D accelerated games of that time ran best with Glide on a Voodoo card. I wouldn't settle for anything less.
@@OpenGL4ever It could be anything with dgvoodoo1 compatibility honestly. I'd want at least 16mb of vram though, preferably 32
@@Eyepatchfilms dgvoodoo1 will probably not work with DOS games that access directly a voodoo chipset. Therefore i would prefer voodoo or better VSA-100 compatibility on hardware level.
@@OpenGL4ever That's probably a lot harder to achieve than the x86 support. Is it possible? Of course, but the alternatives are... finding a real Voodoo compatible chip that is still manufactured (probably impossible), finding new old stock and designing a PCB for it (very difficult, limited quantities), or probably the realistic but technically hardest option, making a FPGA based emulator. I doubt it will ever happen.
@@OpenGL4ever DOS titles with direct Glide support are almost nonexistent and hard to get working even on real hardware if retro TH-cam is to be believed. GTA1 is one of the select few games that do it. Personally I don't remember ever trying to run any pure DOS stuff with Glide so I'll take their word for it.
It's good to have you back lgr, hope you are doing well and staying safe, keep up the amazing technology and lovely work
Looks very nice... but the price! My worthless $2 is: if you want to play old games, you can get an old laptop for $50-$100. Throw in an SD card adapter and a VGA-to-HDMI adapter, and you're good to go for most DOS games, and a lot of later Windows games (3D notwithstanding, mileage may vary). Many manufacturers still have all the drivers on their websites, which makes life a lot easier.
Problem with old HW is generally gonna be caps and/or battery/-ies. If not recapped, you're likely to run into issues. And that can be both costly and a challenge for those without experience/training and equipment. :(
And VGA-HDMI converters can be *real* trashy, especially the China stuff. Cheap ADC's with a bunch of weird scaling issues are commonplace.
I play a lot of old games and with a little Googling you can usually find forums or wiki pages that have complete tutorials for getting a game running on a modern system. Usually it’s messing with some game files or sometimes there’s even open source launchers to streamline the whole process (like with Rollercoaster Tycoon 2)!
Been a very long time since I've seen an old laptop going for under $150
Just bought a windows Xp laptop the other day for around 30 dollars on eBay just needed a charger which was an easy find on Amazon.
@@Wastelandman7000 There are countless old laptops on eBay for under $150.
Awesome, might just pick one of these up :D .
Which keyboard of the 52,000 you seem to have are you using? :P
@trollsthatlol1 currently? The ND75.
I appreciate that the power LED is green instead of blue. A pox on blue LEDs I say!
Technology Connections would agree on that.
A pox indeed hoo raa
When they first invented the blue LED, everything was blue for a minute.
You pretty much addressed every concern I had for this product. I very much _need_ that beeper speaker, and an activity light is definitely a must. That aside, this _is_ pretty neat. I once made a DOS box in the early 2000s, but this is far more convenient!
I imagine Clint asking Pixel about the fact that they sell Windows 98 SE with their machines, saying "That seems a little _unusual_ ..." and like in the movie Contact, the Pixel representative just says "It _is_ unusual, isn't it?" and just hangs up.
Where are they finding legit Windows 98 COEs at this late hour? I hope they're genuine or this little pointless add-in will cost them the farm.
@@mattg7485 I want to believe they just found a thousand or so dusty OEM copies in a container somewhere around a company long since bankrupt, lost and forgotten. And bought at scrap weight price. 😅
@@mattg7485 doesn't look like they have any COA, a bit shaddy
Great to see you back! Keep the great content coming!
Happy New Year, Clint! :)
Glad to see new videos Clint. Loving the content.
I don't think I'd go for it at that price point. It looks nice, but I can think of a number of other things that I can do to get my nostalgic gaming fix.
For one thing, you can get an equivalent PC for free. Plus, you save it from becoming toxic ewaste.
@bobweiram6321 Right!? Dig it out of that sinkhole that was once grandpa's garage! Haha. Of course, I built a cheaper K6-2 system from old parts I found on ebay and elsewhere. Even found a new old-stock mobo. But, it was also PC Chips. So, there's some down sides. Lol.
@@bobweiram6321Are you sure that "free" computer would be of this size and with modern ports (especially SD reader)? Yeah, old one would probably have a floppy drive as a bonus, but tomatoes are still not really comparable to oranges.
@@watcherit1311 If size matters, run an emulator, Proxmox, or Rasberry Pi. Even old 8-bit machines work fine with SD readers. You can walk into any decent thrift store and walk out with free PCs because they usually pay to have them disposed of.
@@BendingInTheWind 😂 I might have sold it to you on eBay for $25 bucks a few years ago. It was a PC chips mobo with an Athlon processor.
Return of the king! Welcome back, Clint, always love seeing these incredible retro PC...things...
Cool idea, it's nice to see something like this show up for today's gamers to be able to almost painlessly sample yesteryear's PC space.
I also find it kinda ... sus ... with MS products and warez so prominently featured. I hope that doesn't come back to bite them later.
Another concern is connecting a Win98 machine to the modern internet ... probably not a wise idea.
I agree that a device specifically marketed to retro enthusiasts needs to have a full compliment of retro connectivity - even if they just use one proprietary port with a splitter dongle having all the old ports (less desirable), but the best solution would be to include 1 9-pin serial, 1 parallel, 1 MIDI/Gameport, 2 PS/2, 1 Ethernet, 1 USB 2.0, 1 3.5mm rear speaker jack, 1 3.5mm front headphone jack, and 1 power connection.
A dedicated power switch is highly desired, as well as a HDD LED to show storage access activity.
Also on the front should be the power and reset buttons, and the storage media slot.
I would also like to see some minimalist version of GNU+Linux available to order pre-installed - but that's just me being wishful ;)
Overall I like the thing. I hope they do well enough to be able to afford dropping the price later which would perhaps attract more casual users who can't justify the current high cost of entry.
Unless one were to browse old cached web pages it's pretty pointless to connect win98 to the Internet since you can't really do anything with it as all browsers are decades out of date... Nothing will work.
And I agree, a HDD access led would be a good addition. Even cooler would be an appropriately sized CF card slot so you can use an IBM Microdrive and have a real mini hard disk in your mini PC :)
@@volvo09I'm sure the Thorium browser has builds for XP that can apparently be used on win2000. 98 is probably pushing it though, unfortunately.
Would have been interesting if it had a Glide-compatibile graphics card included.
that would be cool but a really hard ask. Maybe if these newly made retro computers become successful enough someone may be crazy enough to implement it eventually.
5/64th = 1.98mm so let's just call it 2mm 🙂
'Murica!!! Even the screws have to be a completely obscure standard to most other parts of the world.
It is a 2mm most likely, seeing how the thing it is used in comes from Europe, which is also another good reason to call it such. Sorry, I can't help myself..
A good rule of thumb is, if it's a really weird size in inches, then it's probably a standard size in mm.
Everyone in the US is a musician, with their fractions. 7/8ths.
@masterkamen371 It was made in the EU. But go off. Living in your head rent free.
Nice to see you back!
New LGR video! joy!
Glad to see that you're posting again 🙌🙌🙌
Happy new year Clint and hope you get to move back into your home this year.
Loved it!👍👍😁❤️
Best wishes for this new year.🎉
Greetings from
The Netherlands❤
it's good to see something like the WeeCee coming into production and on sale. looking to get myself one of these, just need to find my PS/2 Keyboard and mouse, get a USB floppy and CD drive, and i'll be playing old school windows and DOS like no tomorrow
Great stuff, glad you're getting back to videos after the rough time with storms & everything else. These are cool, only gripe is not having a dedicated video chip but I know that'd cost more to implement. I still have an old retro Dell laptop with a 1.1Ghz P3, maxed 512MB memory, upgraded 80GB laptop drive & Nvidia GeForce2 Go video. Other than the screen being a little dim & re-pasting the CPU, it's a little beast & works great with an external LCD. Pretty sure I snagged in during a parts recycling run at an old job like 10 years ago, outside the hard drive being shot the only thing it needed was a new battery. This & my Thinkpad T61 are my go-to Win98 & XP retro gaming systems, they don't build laptops like they used to.
I love your vintage PC in that Lian-li aluminum case. I love your dives into old vintage hardware.
You hit an amazing cross-section of my high school and early college gaming favorites here! Need For Speed, Doom, Quake, Duke 3D, Carmaggedon, old-school GTA, Tomb Raider, Fallout, and was that Terminal Velocity near the end? Just missing Worms and Counterstrike!
Always nice to grab some breakfast and have a brand new LGR to watch while I eat.
Love seeing a good upload from you after all that happened last year. Hope all is well. Love your content
I love the idea, but I just can't get over the price. I can pickup a Shuttle XPC with a low end AGP 3d card for under $100 with SATA / FDD support for native hardware / peripherals... Yes, I may have to replace a capacitor or battery, and yes- they are giant compared to this solution, but again, 4-5x cheaper and still widely available (no, you don't need a huge ATX box for native retro computing). In any case, I wish them best of luck and I look forward to seeing the ITX revision. The audience who want an all in one solution for this type of computing are almost certainly going to be able to tinker themselves or already run emulation, so it's neat, but I don't see the market being there to support it long term (which is probably why they are cross-linked to the warez sites).
shuttle XPCs had absolute rotten power supplies inside them, replacing them with anything good is hard, especially if you have an Athlon which requires strong 5v line. Sure you can find flimsy modern ones to fit, but nothing reliable for strong 5v rail.
Love the aluminum shell 😊
LGR: "I'm back!"
Peasants: "Rejoice!"
Glad that you're hanging in there!!!
Always great to see new LGR
My dream item of this kind would be a 266 MMX with a pair of 12mb Voodoo 2s. Time to brainstorm.
266 Mhz is not enough to run V2 SLI at their full potential. It's more like 500 MHz.
@@lordwiadro83 Ah. I only had them with a terribly Compaq Presario iirc 5240, AMD K-6 of some sort. I miss the visuals I got through those boards, the Glide wrappers haven't satisfied me.
LGR gives off those old television vibes but with a modern flare just a guy talking what he's good at and honestly i have no clue about this stuff and what things do or don't it's just a nice think to watch and unwind to and the jazz in background defiantly adds to it
CLINT! Hope you are well Friend! Glad you are able to get back in the saddle again.
I hope things get better for you this year, keep up the cool tech videos if you can
Welcome back Mr. LGR.
I haven't heard the word 'warez' in a long time. Very appropriate for the video.
Among these improvements, why not make it in a few classic PC case look? Just in mini size? Like the C64 mini.
Would look awesome, with working LED-s as stuff :)
looks like a fun little setup. GL in the New Year
Man I would LOVE this thing, but the price is a bit much for me atm. Fantastic video!
Getting closer and closer to one of these projects recreating the Windows 95/DOS PC that I grew up with.
Welcome back!
Sending all the love to Clint. Hope he is managing well after what happened. Thank you for finding the motivation to continue making awesome videos ❤️
I kind of want one. That era of gaming was my introduction to pc gaming. Diablo was my first western rpg lol my dad had a friend who had a bunch of old computers, then I was in scouts with a computer guy. Changed my life for the better.
As soon as you started discussing the internals of the DX model alarm bells starting ringing in my head "that sounds EXACTLY like the mini DOS computers TheRasteri has been making variants of for the past few years!" And sure enough, you mentioned the similarities moments later. It's a neat iteration, but considering the price they're charging it certainly seems like they could've taken some time to polish the I/O connections and layout
I think it is necessary to make pcie 3dfx modules for such devices. 8 Mb Vram with wifi and 3dfx together would be great.
Happy New Year! It's nice that new products are coming up for the retro enthusiasts, but I agree with your criticism of this one. The price point is hefty too, considering you still need additional hardware on top of all that...
I wish retro projects like this didn't cost anywhere near this much, they'd be significantly more accessible for most people if they were. I'm sure a lot of the cost goes into making the chips that they run on, but in my personal experience something labeled "untested" on eBay has been cheaper in the long run. 86box is amazing for this reason because it's a free emulator that lets you customize a virtual system to what you need and have very little conflict despite it being emulation.
Emulation can cause problems with legacy peripherals and input latency. A virtual machine is better
I wish it as well, but the fact is that the system-on-module is the expensive part, and they don't make those themselves. The Vortex86DX modules range (based on layout, memory and such) anywhere from about 200 USD to 600+ USD on the storefronts where I've seen them, because the buyers are industrial types, not consumers.
Pixel x86 allows you to order the device without the SOM if you have one or want to source elsewhere, and you get 249€ off from the price, that's basically where all the money is.
If something like this ever comes out supporting up to the early 2000s era performance with GPU? Something like a Pentium III 1Ghz w/ Voodoo 3? I'd be all over that. It would cover everything from the Win9x era for me, and would snag one up in a heartbeat.
Still, this is pretty cool to have native execution of this era's software, without emulation. Props to the Pixel guys. 🍻
will be cheaper and better
Not styling it after an old PC was something of a missed opportunity. Sure, there are thousands of different case designs to choose from, but they were mostly pretty similar and they could pick and choose elements from a few different ones to give us something that was unmistakably ‘80s/‘90s.
Imagine making it look like one of those old MIDI breakout boxes like Roland made; they were about the size of this thing.
Happy new year Clint! Thanks for another awesome tech video!
500 bucks for that?
Explains why they’re still in stock, indie projects like this are always out of stock by the time I see reviews. It doesn’t have OpenGL or 3DFx too. Not sure what this offers over virtualization, tbh.
You pay for the convenience and simplicity. It is niche yes, but you could say the same for many things that cost a lot of money. Most normal people aren't paying multiple-thousands for proper camera hardware for example.
These projects always waste time on unnecessary features and thus price themselves way out of the market they supposedly compete in. Original, (reliable even) hardware is still not so expensive as to warrant a 450 EUR replacement. Well known hardware combinations are plug and play.
If you want original hardware, just build a Socket 775 or AM2 rig. With current prices, you can build a full system for like $40.
C-media PCI sound card, next to nothing on eBay. Very low end ATI PCI graphics card (very high end indeed for 90s games), next to nothing. It will also give you great 3D and 2D acceleration.
Core 2 Duo is the best choice for Intel because of the power efficiency and the ability to lower power consumption (so that you can have a silent PC and use little power). For AM2, use whatever you can get your hands on for around $0.
Sometimes the BIOS lets you disable the L1 and L2 cache, which will at most give you i586 performance. With some tweaking you can get Wing Commander to run at an appropriate speed.
For Intel, check out Phil's Computer Lab, he's got detailed guides for achieving this.
@@Photo0021300+ for wireless microphones for content creation. Nice audio is good😅 .And small numbers. Recently i was thinking of what it would cost if I made an RC car shell myself and price it realistically. A workhour would be about 150€ and if I say 10...... 😂 Make it yourself.
@@Photo0021But this isn’t speciality equipment, it’s still a consumer product.
18:00 The ITX one make a lot of sense! Very neat. It's nice to see solutions to running older software. I was finally able to play my favorite recing game Outrun 2006 on a current gen PC thanks to a modder's project called OutRun2006Tweaks, but otherwise that game would have been a no-go unless I built something older.
If they could get that down to a more realistic price of like $150, it would be worth it for some people. But its current price is way too much for what it is.
i saw 89 euro on the site and was like "ya im buying this" then realized thats not everything you need and its more like $400-500 lol
I think the Vortex86 module is about 1/2 the price of the machine if I recall.
Absolutely. I'm drowning in motherboards that need recapped and a couple of 3dfx cards i don't have anything to attach to rigt now. SOmething, anything, at about the £150 would be life changing
Looks like a cool set of devices! I could see myself investing in one just to downsize one of my retro builds.
Great video... I have been waiting for someone to review these tiny PCs. They sound intriguing but I think I'm still going to wait just a bit for them to mature and maybe get a bit cheaper as well. ^^
It would be cool if the board had a CF card interface so you could throw an IBM microdrive in it and have a miniature hard drive in your miniature pc 😊
This video has 20 min but probably took a whole week to produce thanks for the work!
Welcome back Mr.LGR!!
What I'd like to see is a handheld version of this. Like, an "MSDOS GameBoy" sort of concept, with an autoexec game launcher list program. Although control setup might be tricky, with different games using different keyboard input. The buttons would have to be remappable to keys on a per-game basis somehow.
Ms-dos deck ftw :D
Probably, the most user-friendliest option would be running Retroarch + Dosbox Pure in a modern PC-Handheld (ideally with touchpad and touchscreen like Steam Deck).
The WeeCee seems more of a fit for me. Thanks for throwing that in there!
The DX is the same hardware :)
Unfortunately the WeeCee is not something you can buy, but if you have the skills and resources you could build one for perhaps a bit less!
Hehehehehe
I like the idea. between work and school at night, my bandwidth to tinker is limited. And so is my time.
The price is outrageous though....
Yeah, this is just paying for continence. However you may just end up inconveniencing yourself in the end. Between the price and the lack of upgradability it's a dull product. This also would take out all the fun of building a retro pc in the first place.
look at the price of a modern mini PC vs full size. This is a pretty standard SFF/Mini Tax
The cpu module is over $200 if I recall, so it's like 1/2 of the cost.
It's certainly a niche product.
In Euro.... I'll stay with my MiSTer and the oa486 core...
€485... If you're gonna charge that price, at least make it €486 and pass it of as a joke.
Missed opportunity.
Good to have you back Clint!
For all those critical of its pricing, I would point out that this is new hardware so you cannot compare it to 2nd hand stuff from the era. But first and foremost, this is not intended for consumers. This thing is made to upgrade/replace all sorts of embedded systems from the 90's that exist in industrial roles where replacing them for something else is not an option, for whatever reason. There are control systems for huge industrial machines that run on old 486 class hardware that cannot be ported to newer hardware for myriad reasons. So, those kinds of customers are not sensitive to a price of a couple of hundred for an SoC module, which just for clarity is likely why this thing exists - if there were no customers to whom a relatively high price was zero issue, the whole thing would never have been made.
So while I am not going to run out and buy one of these things, I do appreciate that there are those who make these sorts of things that make it possible to obtain relatively new hardware capable of running old applications.
Retro gamers are not the market for these chips and never will be, because as a market it's nowhere remotely big enough for companies to invest the millions required to have this sort of chips fabricated. Us having access to these things is just a side effect of the need of big industrial players who would probably buy the things even if they cost $1000 a piece, since that is a very small price to pay to keep tens of millions worth of machinery running without the downtime and tens of thousands required to upgrade the whole system both hardware and software.
"New" hardware, apart from the soc that drives the whole thing. 😂
You'd have a point if they weren't marketed on their website as PCs for retro gaming.
@@TheStevenWhitingI think he’s talking about the Vortex86, not the final product. Those alone being a couple hundred dollars apiece is what drives up the price of the finished product.
Happy New Year mate. Hope you are well.
As Clint showed, the Vortex86DX struggles with 3D games like UT (released in 1999) but I wonder if the Vortex86DX3 would fare better? (even if it still has to run games in software mode)?
Based on my experience from the Rise mp6 this is based on the Cyrix cpus of the era were fast compared to the rise.
I can't believe after all that damage you went back to regular content in only a few months!
I would get one if it had the option to have a 3DFX graphics accelerator
thanks Clint, those are cool :)
Those Vortex CPUs are technically 486SX with the clocks cranked up. No wonder that 800 MHz feels like 300 MHz Pentium.
Not true, because they both have a FPU, and support the 586 instruction set. So they are Pentium like.
@lordwiadro83 well, that's what's I remembered from datasheet that I read back on a day. I doublechecked it and it seemes that there were more versions released. My bad.
...around $500 is kind of a hard pill to swallow for this, I mean, it's pretty awesome, if I had that kind of money to throw around I'd probably grab it.
It's a pretty niche product, looks well designed and sturdy... IDK, I wouldn't expect someone to manufacturer these at a loss. Seems reasonable imo, if cost is a major factor I'd wager one could build one for half the price, just my take.
First! Glad to see you uploading again LGR. Many prayers to you and your family.
Good to see we're back to our regularly scheduled programming. Great vid, Clint!
The Mini looks incredible. Very nice design and love the modular nature.
The man himself is back!
This looks cool, id perhaps buy this for 50-100 bucks maybe.. I wonder what it co- OH sweet jesus no go away.
Based on experience with Raspberry Pi, running an OS on an SD card is iffy in terms of the lifespan of those cards. You could boot one of these from an external drive but that boosts the cost even more. It’s not hard to back up these cards but that’s still extra work.
For the price seems like a MiSTer Pi would be a better choice.
It'd be amazing to see a flavor of this idea as a brand new ATX or micro ATX motherboard with a few PCI, ISA and AGP if possible - maybe with the biggest compromise being soldered RAM only. Could add a 12VDC to -5VDC supply onto the board for ISA, and use the 24 pin ATX power connector. I hope the Mini ITX boards evolve into this someday!
I realize this is niche but does anyone remember the fps game Land of the Dead: Road to Fiddler’s Green? Man, I’d kill to be able to play that. Genuinely think it’s worth a remaster for modern systems but I know that’s silly thinking. I know it was also for Xbox I think too. Next to Goldeneye, my favorite game as a kid, even though 007 was a bit earlier
I can confirm it was for the OG Xbox and was a great game, but nobody else played it!
I'd love to see a video comparing current modern emulation/virtualization options (86box, PCem, DOSBox, VMWare, etc) at some point. Especially would love to see how they can handle real peripherals (for those that support passthrough) and troublesome software.
My first thought is if some determined hackers might be able to figure out how to overclock the Mini version and turn it into more of the ultimate version. But at that price I don't see much of a following developing. The mITX version though looks cool, and that PCI slot is BEGGING for a Voodoo :)