LGR
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2023
15:19 · 713K views · Nov 19, 2021
LGR reviews the weeCee, a tiny mini PC that boots MS-DOS and Windows from a microSD card. It offers Sound Blaster Pro and General MIDI compatibility with VGA output, and the video tries it with DOS and Windows 98 games.
Cited as an example of a compact, ready-made way to play retro DOS games on real hardware without collecting old machines.
3 comments from Hacker News
I have been having so much fun doing Retro stuff. Vogons is the place to be for this area. I bought a Compaq Presario 4505. Then did lots of upgrades * Ram to 64MB * CPU is a 233MMX * 512KB COAST * Voodoo 3 3000 PCI * IDE -> SATA with a 32GB SSD * Audician 32 Plus Wavetable cards are especially fun. Serdashop sells a bunch of interesting ones. X2GS, Yucatan FX, E-Wave, McFly and X2S are popular ones. Check out this[0] video. The music can be so dramatically different depending on what hardware you have. It is fun switching between cards. Games from this era just had so much passion put into them and you can feel it while playing. I am playing System Shock 1 right now and you can see all the different experiments that went into the game (some good and some bad). ---- Another cool device to check is the WeeCee [1]. If you want to play games on real hardware but don't feel like collecting (and troubleshooting) old hardware. [0] [LINK] [1] this video
Sure, there are emulators, but I was thinking of a native system. Emulators seem to work great, but I try to avoid several layers of abstractions. Also, feeling nostalgic about how a native FreeDOS system boots in literally 2 seconds (on a modest laptop), I guess. Someone built this: [LINK] And this, the weeCee; the price point estimated in the comments is around $600, though: this video A third one, with lots of diy involved: [LINK] It is interesting nonetheless that really-low-spec SBCs have not gone into the masses (thus resulting in dirt-cheap prices) the way the RPis have. It is still a nice dream to see this happening with the current rise of retrocomputing.
Love it. There's a decent number of these still available for commercial applications. I'll have to dig it out but there was a guy who got a game running on a dosboard used in a piece commercial kitchen hardware[0-1]. And even "gaming" machines[2]. I bet LGR on YouTube would love it. [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [2] this video