Intro
I've always been interested in computers. My first PC, bought as a kid from money saved from a part-time job was a second-hand PC-XT clone with a nice green monitor, and I had loads of fun messing with that. Later, one of my uncles found out about my interests, and whenever he came over, he would bring some hardware that he didn't have a need for anymore: hard disks, main boards, processors. The stuff he brought over was mostly 486-based and I have fond memories of me messing around with those chips and boards: overclocking the CPU using a crystal transplant, exchanging memory and ISA cards and tweaking BIOS variables. I stayed on the 486 platform for a fairly long time, only moving on when I got a part-time job building computers and could afford the components for a brand-new Pentium 2 machine.
When I owned that 486 machine, I didn't really have much technical knowledge about the exact hardware. At some point I did figure out how the ISA bus worked, because I remember hacking together a flash programmer from an old ISA riser card, some address decoding chips and a socket for an AM29F512. However, I always viewed the mainboards that I had in my hands as Deeper Magic: So many traces! Such large ICs! So many obscure components!
It's 30 years later now. I still have fond memories of those times, and I play the games in DOSBox every now and then. However, I could also play them on actual hardware. Maybe it's time for me to try and build my own PC again. In order to do that, I made the VapourDeck, which is a retro Steam Deck type handheld which can play all your old DOS games. And there's no emulation, there's actually a custom 486-powered system in this thing:
Read on if you want to know how I made this.
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