When you think of a modern gaming PC you probably think of a tower unit, with a side window and all sorts of glaring RGB. However, gaming PCs in the ’90s were a lot different. Back then you got a beige box of a monitor, sitting on top of a beige box of a desktop unit, and you were grateful for it.
This 3D printed miniature gaming PC gives me such a wave of nostalgia for those halcyon days, I can almost smell the plastic casing. I mean, just look at it. Those rounded lines. The weeny little lights. The miniature CD ROM/floppy drive combo. THOSE DECALS! It’s my childhood distilled down to its tiniest form.
YouTuber Salim Benbouziyane set out to create a working miniature version of the ultimate ’90s computer, after feeling a similar rush of nostalgia for the good old days of PCs (via Yanko Design). Unsurprisingly, under the hood is a Raspberry Pi 4 like many other miniature projects, but after that everything becomes a lot more custom.
For the screen, Benbouziyane picked a square 720 x 724 Waveshare panel, and masked the top and bottom to provide a 4:3 aspect ratio. For the light indicators, rather than simply installing a set of modern LEDs, light pipes were used to create an appropriately nostalgic glow. There’s also a miniature working power button, and an SD card reader where the media drives would normally be. This required designing a custom PCB add-on for the Raspberry Pi.
The 3D printed chassis was hand sanded to create those smooth, rounded lines, and air-brushed with a custom colour to create the appropriate shade of off-white/beige. I’d highly recommend watching the full video above, as the level of attention to detail is simply staggering. Far from being a simple mock-up, Benbouziyane has gone to town on every detail possible to create something that not only looks like the cutest PC you’ll ever see, but gets all the historical details right for ultimate accuracy.
There’s even been the odd happy accident. The monitor wobbles on top of the chassis, which Benbouziyane characterises as a “sloppy joint”, but to my mind it actually increases the accuracy. Shifting around an old desktop with a CRT on top would absolutely cause the monitor to wobble around. They were solid old beasts, ’90s rigs, but the odd wobble and creak was part of the experience.
The end result, thanks to those Raspberry Pi internals and a huge dose of creative engineering, is magnificent. While it looks like it’s running Windows XP, it’s actually running a skinned version of Twister OS—but the PC has no issues blasting through a bit of OG Doom, Prince of Persia, or even those great bastions of my broke early gaming years, Solitaire and 3D Pinball.
Ah, nostalgia. It’s a heady thing, and just looking at this miniature marvel makes me want to slap together a ’90s rig of my own for the sheer joy of the experience. I don’t possess the skills to make it this small, of course, but I reckon a spot of original Doom on a rig like this might bring a mist to my eyes. A tiny tear, if you will.
