If you’re big into retrocomputing, you probably spend a lot of time chasing parts and machines on online classifieds or through local swap meets. But what if there was a different way to build a classic retro PC? What if you could put one together from bare chips, from the ground up?
[Jeroen Domburg] is no stranger to the pages of Hackaday. You might know him by his alias, [sprite_tm], under which he’s shared many projects, from miniaturizing old hardware to unearthing the secrets of undocumented commercial hardware. Now, he’s turning his considerable skills to figuring out how to build a retro PC in today’s world, and came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to show us all how it’s done.
Game On
[Jeroen’s] goal was simple—to build a powerful retro gaming PC from the ground up. The first thing to decide was which era to target, with [Jeroen] deciding that 1995 seemed the most personally relevant to his interests. This was the peak of the MS-DOS gaming era, before things like DirectX came in and the culture shifted to Windows gaming and the domination of 3D over all else.
What does a good 1995 machine look like? It was probably rocking a 486, or maybe a Pentium, with somewhere between 8-16 MB of RAM. You had a simple video card primarily built for 2D graphics, and a sound card that was probably some variant of Sound Blaster or other. [Jeroen] wanted to build such a machine with as much real silicon as possible, rather than just emulating hardware from this era, and he wanted to do this himself at the component level, rather than just plugging in bits and pieces from eBay. Building a vintage-style PC motherboard from scratch and getting it up and running is a bit of a job, but luckily [Jeroen] has the skills to make it possible.
