Enthusiast builds a working 486 DX2 retro PC on a breadboard in just 16 days, immediately runs Doom

An app engineer has showcased his homemade breadboard 486 DX2 PC running Doom. The intricate explosion-of-wires system build appears to have taken just 16 days, with the first appearance of the legendary Intel CPU on @nagakurage’s timeline on October 24, and a video demo of some fragging in Doom published on November 9. Moreover, the Tokyo-based app engineer behind the project also developed and made a bezelicious ‘CRT monitor’ to go with the homemade early-90s-era gaming beast.

This project’s first signs of life were seen towards the end of October. On October 24, @nagakurage showcased the legendary Intel i486 DX2 CPU that he had acquired. It was the sought-after DX2 66 model, which meant it ran at a blistering 66 MHz internally, and 33 MHz externally (2x multiplier). On the other side of this gray made-in-Malaysia chip, you can see its 168 pins, which look incredibly tree-trunk-like by today’s standards.

The enthusiast next bought a Colorlight i9 v7.2 FPGA board to attach the CPU to and to cover chipset duties. We know this is a breadboard PC, but there are limits… Every pin of the 486 CPU appears to have been connected separately to an experimental ‘socket’ made using a baseboard.

A significant milestone was reached on October 26, when the finished form of the breadboard system started to come into view, and the dev managed to get the CPU to blink an LED using x86 code. RAM was added on October 31, and tweaked to be error-free. Then, on November 3, the enthusiast managed to add microSD storage to the system. That same day @nagakurage enjoyed seeing the breadboard 486 boot FreeDOS 1.3 for the first time [machine translation].

The app developer then took a 3D printing diversion and used his Bambu Lab A1 mini to output the parts necessary for a custom CRT-style enclosure. This was designed by Claude and was assembled with a 5-inch 800×480 Elecrow Raspberry Pi panel inside.

Finally, on November 9, @nagakurage showcased his breadboard PC and era-matching design beige-shelled monitor side-by-side and powered up. The seminal shooter looked smooth enough on the vintage 1992 silicon, as it should do.

Going forward, the enthusiast wants to refine this breadboard-based project and make it fully PC-98 compatible, in line with the dominant NEC PC-9800 series in Japan in the early 90s.

In April this year, we reported on another retro computing enthusiast and their breadboard-based Intel 386 system build.

Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.