I’m partial to builds with a retrofuturistic flair, particularly palmtop projects that imagine a portable past that never existed. Taking a leaf from the ‘Windows where it shouldn’t be’ chapter out of the modder’s playbook, one solo tinkerer has built a throwback handheld gaming PC that’s rocking Pentium inside.
Built by maker Changliang Li, his Windows 98 handheld gaming PC plays all the contemporaneous hits, like StarCraft and Tomb Raider II (with of-the-era frame rates, too). Contained in a 3D printed, plastic shell spray painted an authentic shade of yellow that harkens back to its forebears, the homebrew handheld even features a Logitech rollerball mouse (via Hackaday).
As for mouse clicks, those are tied to a lonely little trigger button on the top right-hand corner of the console. It’s a control scheme that looks as nightmarish as it is extra, but that’s not the most interesting facet of the project. Given how svelte APU chips have to be to fit inside even the bulkiest of today’s best handheld gaming PCs, it’s worth remembering how bulky 90s desktop mainboards used to be—so, how does this throwback build achieve such a reasonable form factor?
Rather than emulation, Changliang Li instead chose to crack open decommissioned medical apparatus from the ’90s for surprisingly small, contemporary hardware. This effort turned up a pc104 industrial motherboard with support for Intel Pentium, plus all the ports you could want. Before you ask, yes, you could in theory hook up a floppy drive to this thing.
Even the screen is practically an antique, with the modder salvaging a 480p resolution LCD and its accompanying motherboard to match the 4:3 aspect ratio of many games of the era. However, the PS/2 keyboard features a fairly unique layout that necessitates a bespoke PCB (which has since been redesigned and gone open source).
Given what a revelation it was to me to be able to load up Diablo II on my seriously underpowered uni notebook not even a decade ago, this handheld Pentium PC would’ve no doubt blown my tiny little mind back in 1998. However, with design quirks such as the power switch being situated between the rollerball mouse and the keyboard, perhaps it’s just as well this was a techie road not taken.
It probably doesn’t help that the build looks not unlike a Nintendo 2DS that got lost somewhere in the ’90s. When it comes to techie time travel, getting Windows 95 on a hacked Nintendo 3DS proved a similarly cursed endeavour for another modder—to say almost nothing of this attempt to jam Windows 95 onto a Sony PlayStation 2.
