Tiny ( I mean REALLY small ) x86 soc 486 pc

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Sardine

Sardine

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got myself a month or so ago an Ebox 3350dx2 pc

its about the same size as a 2.5" hdd ( slightly bigger a bit more square shaped )

its fantastic. not 100% compatible but ill take it.
It's designed for XP but I dont want a slow buggy XP install.

downside it has 0 drivers for WIn98 ( I tried ) , 98 installs perfectly but no drivers so no point.
but it boots off SD card as the HDD and will also boot from USB devices without issues ( like an ISO of xp, win98 or dos 6.22 via rufus )

stuck a 16gb sd card in and formatted for dos 7.0 fat32 with dos only in mind.
Very easy to copy too, pop out the sd card ( while it still on ) copy a game then pop it back in and DIR and its there :D

specs.

933mhz 486DX cpu ( with mmx but well whatever )
512mb ram, VGA, 3 USB that map my usb wireless keyboard and mouse as PS2 in dos perfectly, accepts an old micro usb phone charger as power and lan.

has HDI PCI sound that only bloody works with SBEMU as a soundblaster with adlib in real and protected modes yipee

as I type this ive played doom , duke3d , way to long playing monkey island ( about half way through lol ) , quake playable at 640x480 , currently looking at lara croft about to fight the dino in tombraider at 640x480 butter smooth.
full throttle plays perfectly no slow down, dark forces , warcraft , fate of atlantis talkie , Need 4 Speed dos perfect.

there are issues, it's not perfect with some games due to the x86 emualtion it does in the background or buggy sound ( doom tends to crash if sound enabled but duke3d perfect 2 full levels no crash ).

with drivers loaded for sound and mouse etc still have 627k base mem 466mb xms ram lol.


the bad news..

I paid not a lot for it but about 2 weeks after I got one techmoan ( youtuber ) made a video on it and now sold out everywhere, I should have bought more than 1 lol.
 
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some dosbench scores.

1:- 3dbench slow pc 42.8fps but it looks faster
2:- 3dbench fast pc 126.5fps
3:- chris 3d mark slow pc 116.7fps
4:- chris 3d mark fast pc 151.3 fps
5:- PC player 320x200 97.5
6:- PC player 640x480 97.2

a:- doom slow pc ( very small window ) 287 fps
b:- doom max detail 57 fps
c:- quake timedemo 57,6fps
d:- quake timedemo 360x480 25.9fps
e:- quake timedemo 640x480 33.6fps

landmark detects a 486dx at 675mhz
sysinfo says cyrix 586 at 732mhz
speedsys says Vortex86 SoC 866mhz, cpu mark 230

using Himem instead of jemmex ( no real mode sound )
speedsys now says 933mhz with mmx = YES and 16kb l1 and 256kb L2 cache cpu core 235.
 
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StrongARM said:
Really only for xp?!

I use ASUS UN65H and similar since years and they are still cool (IMHO). ;-)
Click to expand...
thats modern hardware, this thing I have is basically a 486 with MMX instruction set,
 
@Sardine This thing is really cool, but then I can't get the MISTer AO486 core out of my mind as another overall tiny yet lovely piece of kit that also of course becomes a killer Amiga. When it comes to hardware choices, we are truly spoiled at this time.

Can you guys imagine going back 30 years and showing someone the MISTer FPGA in 1994? They'd lose their minds at what it could do. :-). I think it's no less amazing today.
 
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