It has been a although given that we’ve seen a 86Duino, but [TheRasteri] reminded us about it, with his online video exhibiting how to use one to run typical MS-DOS video games. To be reasonable, the laptop or computer isn’t seriously an Arduino, it’s fundamentally a small 486 Computer system on an Arduino-design and style PCB.
If it were just managing DOS online games on a little Personal computer, that would not be quite newsworthy. Nevertheless, the board by by itself has no video clip card and, as [TheRasteri] details out, sound card compatibility is also a trouble. A provider board, even so, has a tiny VGA card on it, and many thanks to some function from an additional consumer, it is doable to insert an ISA bus to the board if you want to plug in a legacy audio card.
The ISA hack was done neatly, but it is a bit of wiring. Alternatively of making use of a usual ISA backplane, it is possible to use a Computer/104 backplane, if you have playing cards that will healthy that bus — electrically, they are the same. The board was ready to operate DOOM and Quake at practically 30 frames per 2nd. Not undesirable. He did have troubles having a mouse to get the job done, while.
Bought a bit nostalgic seeing him use QBasic to immediately generate to registers on an ISA card. If you want an old DOS device and don’t want to tie up a lot of space, this could be the ticket. Primarily if you will need it to operate some aged piece of hardware that won’t get the job done with modern computer systems. We have to question if anyone would make a USB to ISA adapter out of some thing like this. The drivers would appear to be to be the difficult part.
We saw the 86Duino virtually 10 a long time in the past when there were a couple of other x86 solitary-board computer systems all around. Evidently, a lot of persons want to operate classic video games.