Playing with Power
This retro handheld PC, built with 1990s hardware, runs Win98 and proves we could have been playing Doom when all we had was a Game Boy.
Back in the mid-1990s, the Nintendo Game Boy and Sega Game Gear were some of the best options for portable gaming. Or for those lucky enough to be doing some 16-bit gaming on the go, an NEC TurboExpress with a Bonk's Adventure cartridge was the ultimate status symbol. These systems all had some amazing games, but as it turns out, we could have been playing some much more advanced games on our portables at the time, like Doom, Warcraft II, and Descent. Kind of makes Super Mario Land look weak by comparison, huh?
This would have been prohibitively expensive to do at the time, of course, but as Changliang Li demonstrated in a recent project, it would certainly have been possible. Li built a retro handheld computer from hardware that was all available circa 1995. It runs Windows 98 natively, so the retro gaming options are virtually endless.
The console is built around a compact motherboard that conforms to the PC/104 embedded computer standards. It comes equipped with a 166MHz Pentium processor and 32MB of RAM soldered directly to the board. DOS gaming heaven, here I come! It also has a 512MB CompactFlash card for storage, a custom, ergonomic split keyboard, and a trackball. Furthermore, there is a vintage 5.6-inch LCD display with an appropriate 4:3 aspect ratio.
Li’s retro handheld computer may be 30 years too late, and it would have cost thousands of dollars more to produce at that time, but it is still fun to think how this could have coexisted beside the Game Boy. But for today, this little device might be about the most perfect, and most authentic, way to play a round of Duke Nukem on the road. As Duke might say: "What are you waitin' for? Christmas?"