I had access to 180 of these exact computers from 1993 to 1998. I used them to automate asphalt plants in the Southeastern states from Texas to Virginia controlling OPTO-22 hardware.

The socket for the BIOS IC is probably meant to be used for the disk-in-chip. In regards of power supply, you could extend your pc-104 ISA "backplate" with an AT/ATX power connector and power your mini board directly through the ISA port. In the way as the Voltage Blaster was designed to supply -5V, which I designed together with PhilsComputerLab. UPD: That realtek 3105 is utter shit. It is basically an 8-bit VGA card and is a desperate bottleneck even for a 386SX-25.

It's actually quite significant that you got the digitized sound out of Duke Nukem II. They used a sound blaster specific codec for it that not very many clones implemented, ADPCM.

I worked for Ampro on their first product. It was a single-board computer also, called the Little Board Z80. It was just the right size to mount onto the back of a 5-1/4" Floppy Disk Drive and it ran CP/M-80 v2.2. I wrote the SCSI Hard disk driver for that board. It was a sweet product.

Thanks for video! This topic is close to me as I'm working on creating my own tiny PC104-like computer with a 386SX40 (M6117D) CPU, 4Mb of RAM, TVGA9000i video, ES1868 sound, onboard WiFi and CF slot, powered by microusb, and all this will be packed into 2 neat boards within G738 plastic case.

Well that went in a direction I didn't expect. That setup grew like an organic lifeform. I expect most industrial controllers of the day did not require much from the computer.

I have a few XT versions of these, that IC socket you said was bios is for a "disk on chip", which is where they normally boot from. Usually with just a stripped down DOS, and one program, often written to not need a screen etc. The main reason for these is that writing the software on a PC, for a PC, is considered by some people to be easier than using a micro controller etc. In their intended environment, the user interface is often a few indicator lamps and a few switches, no keyboard or monitor - looking at the machine you would never know there is a PC in there. The one's I scored came out of pay TV (as in cable TV) video scramblers, with no user controls at all.

There was a show called How It's Made, and on an episode they showed a company that made rolls for player-pianos. And they still used Apple IIs because of like you said, the expense of switching to newer hardware and software. I would imagine they had a closest of Apple IIs incase the productions ones broke.

That was awesome. A trip down memory lane for sure 😁👍 I laughed when you introduced the board as a neat option for tiny formfactor gaming and then continued to stack isa adapters on it 🤣🤣

You may not like it, but this is what peak cyberdeck looks like. Great work.

The usual thing as is with tiny computers: After plugging in all the peripherals you need, you might as well have used a mini PC (like barebone PC: like BRiX or NUC).

Awesome video. Really enjoyed you showing how you worked around all the issues with the board, very cool

You missed a pin installing the board onto the main board! On 6:48 you can see it.

You really won me with Jazz Jackrabbit. My all-time favourite DOS game. Loved it and young kids still enjoyed playing it long after much more elaborate games came out. I remember playing it on a 386 machine and frame rate was OK then. But then this is a SX. Very interesting video BTW, thanks for making me knowing these industrial boards and the PC104 form factor.

Really enjoy these videos on using industrial PCs for DOS gaming. I loved the WeePC but really interested in the ISA card expansion. A big part of PCs is being able to expand with different sound and video cards. Would be great to see a video on using a PC104 board that's really available and combine with standard ISA card expansion that can be installed to a standard PC case. Would be great to have an alternative to using vintage PCs from the 80s and 90s.

That is a fantastic Frankenstein's Monster of a PC. Do more with it for us to enjoy! 😊👍

What a neat video! Great job sorting out all the challenges! Enjoyed watching.

I found in a scrapyard a similar (386@40, 4M RAM, IDE&FDD+Disk-on-chip module) PC104 form factor board. Here PC104 stuff are very expensive and hard to find. However, recently I got a 486 motherboard that had all the big chips (BIOS, chipset, Keyoard controller, RTC) removed (damn gold scrapers) and left only with the ISA connectors and some bus drivers. Soon I will try to make an adapter to use the PC104 board on the zombie 486 motherboard.

I used your design to print some of those isa adapters, thanks so much for designing that! I added a GUS clone to a PC/104 board i have with it.

Nice! I've got several Megatel PC104 386 SBCs. They interestingly pack a flash drive, floppy controller, IDE controller, VGA controller and ethernet controller all on the same board. Megatel is defunct, but they made some breakout boards that allow you to install them on (I think) a PICMG backplane for adding other 16-bit ISA accessories. All of these are available through a 32x3 connector. I really need to get mine running; I think they'd be a fun tiny PC.

And this is why the PC compatible system became the dominant computing platform. It's incredible level of modular design to add whatever you could imagine to it, and could all be a hodgepodge of different manufacturers, allowing one to shop for the lowest prices per feature set they wanted. No other platform came close to it.

Should come with a warning label "Don't use me as a computer" 😀 Of course it's made for backend stuff and should do that quite ok. Like smaller databases of various projects maybe and industry of course as it was intended. But this has been a trend for so many years now, when the goal is to see if you can game on, well anything. I guess what I have not seen yet would be someone trying to game on the chips from steroes/VCR/old cameras or a remote control, if it even is possible :) fun to watch though.

Pretty cool. Glad you didn’t short the video card on your adapter screw holes.

FrankenPC from 80s, love it! 👌

God I love creating these frankenstein pc's. Different parts that were never made to fit and still get the magic flowing. Love the wobling monster you create with all the adapters and still it plays =)

great video! A friend and I were at a carwash in Garland Texas cleaning our cars one afternoon and a young guy pulled into a stall driving a yellow Viper. We got to talking to him and just hanging out and he turned out to be the guy that created Wolfenstein. My friend and I were both pc fans so we really appreciated the experience. Find a faster crystal and see if you can speed that 386 up a little.

Awesome project! Great to hear Wolfenstein after all these years, nice one!

"It made a popping sound, thats a good start" lmao. I know you where speaking to the speaker ... but generally a pop is followed by the smoke being let out ;) cheers and keep up the good work!

That is crazy! Anyway really interesting experience!

Well that was a lot of fun!... Good on ya!... Looking forward to more content and new adventures!

Man, my first PC was a Magnavox Headstart 386sx 20 MHz with 2 MB of RAM, and I spent WAY too much time playing Wolfenstein 3d & Duke Nukem 2 on that thing back in the day... That was over 25 years ago, and this video really takes me back.

this board and your home-made adapters would make a good custom mini 386 computer project. 3d print your own mini case and lay out the parts to make them fit of a size of a nuc pc. be interesting what it would look like.

From a performance standpoint the 386SX was just a 286 with 386 compatibility, with a slight better memory mangement. The SX was 32 bit chip internally, but with 16bit bus and often slower than the 286 given the same clock.

Thanks for posting this content, I have read DOS being used in embedded system but never seen any hardware, this is very interesting!

Would be nice if these ISA adapters would have some kind of power input to power the computer over ISA.

That is one hell of a Frankenstein 386.

Neat. I had a PC104 and PC104+ (PCI) board for a little while before I let the magic smoke out. It had a power connector header similar to this board, but only needed +5V. After constantly worrying about plugging it in the wrong way, I bought a set of permanent markers to mark which way round it went. While getting ready to mark it, I noticed it already had a red paint mark on it, nice! So, that's where +5V goes, because, well red = +5V... It marked pin 1, guess what pin 1 was...

Thank you. I'd not remembered Jazz jack rabbit in a long time..

I really love your way of upcycling!

first thought! whoa, how nice that tiny 386, final result bulkier than an actual 386 build, lol. It was pretty awesome nevertheless!

That is froogin’ nuts, dood!

Noooo way! Another video 😀 Saving this for tonight so I can watch it and enjoy in bed. Can't wait! 💗

That was fantastic! Too bad it wasn't an 80386 DX, but it still performed well enough to call this a success. 🙂

I love the sheet of notebook paper to keep the boards from shorting against each other.

As I remember, even the 386DX wouldn't handle Very Large drives. There were probably controller cards out there, but that's why I recycled the board and moved on.

I am a simple man, I see TheRasteri post some pc104 content and I click on it instantly. Great vid fella!

Would love to see more, I'm gonna have to make a pc104 to ribbon to isa adapter now

THE most elegant PC. Love it !

Much LOVE for these tiny systems ! :-D

That was a bit of a monstrosity and it was glorious!

Cool video but I would never try to run DOS games on an SX processor. That FPU on the DX units is vital for performance.

omg...Jazz Jackrabbit....haven't seen that since I installed it for my kids back in the mid 90s

She's a real Frankenstein model. But alive, she's alive!

I just love the concept of these gizmos. I never knew about PC104 until just the past year. Need an excuse to get one.

I'm sure it was deliberate, but I absolutely adore how janky that setup is

Most of us only heard of PC104's after the 200Mhz versions came out in the late 90's. A 24Mhz one from 1989 is like a different universe.

at first blushed seemed like a cool approach - nice little board, but then the boards started multiplying like rabbits

what's cooler than this project is the fact that I just learned Realtek made a VGA controller. No idea

IO.SYS and MSDOS.SYS: These files are system files used by older versions of MS-DOS and Windows operating systems. They contain essential configuration and device driver information and are critical for the system's boot process. this one software use in pendrive after clone 1.The system may not support the PCI bus 2.The PCI adapter may not be properly installed in a slot Some of the PCI adapter resources in configuration space may be invalid

Wait, you don't make your other videos up as you go along?

Yes please continue, I find it super interesting.

ITS BEAUTIFUL!

9:00 I remember this error message from back in the early 90s when I had my first PC that had a whopping 4MB of ram and when I tried to run Doom I got this exact message. Had to make a boot disc to run the game. Didn't know much about computers back then so a friend who put the game on my computer also made the boot disk.

Passive backplane ... Life on easy mode .. Cheers!

So thankful for this

"All right, let's power her up... Well it made a popping noise, that's a good start." "I've never been so happy to hear the Nazi music."

Seeing Wolf 3d running on that 386 (I say three eighty six, perhaps a UK/US thing?) was fun! Great video, Subscribed!

That’s actually really nice. Would be great for say a portable text adventure system.

This was super fun!

That is nuts!

well having a pci breakout board made life easy.

I loved this and I hope you do more!

would be cool to 3D print a Case for this PC designed to accommodate all of these boards and everything, so that this can be built into a proper PC.

The expansion board contraption got much bigger than the mainboard😁!

A beautiful Frankenstein of a 386

I’ve long wondered why there isn’t an entire industry of people who upgrade old industrial hardware so that they can be run with modern computers. I mean I’m sure it happens, but more often than not they just keep using the old machines or eventually just upgrade the entire machine. Things would obviously have to be certified and what not so I bet there would be a decent amount of money in it. It’s just crazy when you find out that state of the art million dollar machines and equipment is being run by old dos computers or ibm power pc. I guess it will be the same decades from now when people talk about how everything is made with raspberry pi or snapdragon. If it’s smart it has one of those in it unless it’s really expensive.

I thought you might have upped the precarious dos gaming setup further by using one of those clip on 486 accelerators but I'm still quite impressed how far you took this.

Jazz and Wolf were unexpectedly fast for an SX25

There is a pin bent on the first ISA adapter and it is sticking out to the right.

Intel developed a radiation hardened version of the i386 CPU, the Hubble space telescope got that CPU in an upgrade in the late 90's.

Tiny 386 is my dream.

That project should be called the "D.O.S Sandwich Pc"

This was hilarious! But, super cool, tool!

the slot over the bios is for actual software, in fact i would get this device not to run DOS but some linux, and use it with a serial terminal and network interface; and it should be neat as an IRC server at home. on a nice glass box cooled by blue or green leds.

I used to mess about with PC/104 stuff when I worked in robotics. The CPUs were Pentium-class and ran an ancient version of Debian GNU/Linux (32-bit).

With a single ISA card coming off it reminded me of how my A1200 kinda looked(obvs on a smaller scale here) when I disassembled it to remove the dead hard disk a few weeks back. The motherboard with expansion card almost as big as it hanging off the side.

Would propably more convenient and cheaper just to find a basic X86 SBC for a "mini MSDOS PC" but then you would still need an adapter if you want to connect any standard isa boards

+1 vote for more "weird industrial computers." The weirder, the better. The more industrial, the better!

No surprise on the performance. It's a 386SX. At a low clockspeed.

The LSI chip must be a SCSI controller, Like also the settings for it in the bios

Wolfenstein my favorite game from those days!!!😃

That's a cool format. Oh. I was thinking of it be neat to make a handheld out of it till you mentioned no video.

We still use the PC104 form-factor in many embedded systems.

386 designed by the Mega Drive design team.. "Nah, just add another layer on top" :D

Great video and test bench here. I remember the 386SX chips as essentially being 286 chips with dual 16 bit busses (which kinda made it a psuedo 32 bit machine??). I had one, but I was never happy with the performance...

Impressive for intel making 386 and 486 processors for 25+ years. As in old days we said if it works don't change it.

a tiny board sounds cool, but having to add all these huge cards for VGA storage controllers etc, it contradicts with the initial idea! lol

Hello, great work! I am trying to get a very similar PC104 board running. Didn't find any suitable pinout, can you please share the pins of the Utility connector to connect a keyboard? Do I need a ps2 keyboard, or will an USB keyboard be fine, too? I am planning to simply cut the connector from the keyboard and connect the wires directly to the corresponding pins of the Utility connector. Thanks for your help! BR Michael

I'm boosting engagement!

I am intrigued On how it's connected in a industrial setup . Maybe for another video .