Yeah, from what I understand... the NEC-V20 supposedly has 16-bit architecture... but is neither supported via the bus or via memory. I think I read somewhere that it was NEC's attempt at building a next generation 80286 style processor, but it didn't quite meet expectations, so they clocked it lower and used it as an 8088. My KayPro also has an NEC V20 in it. I have this 8088 system (uses a backplane like the KayPro with processor on a card) that some guy on YouTube made. I bought one of each of his cards... he has multiple cards that allow you to use the NEC V20 / 8088 processors, the NEC V30, the NEC V40, an 8080, an 8086, and some other processor... all of which you can boot into DOS with. Most games don't work on it, but Red Baron and some of the really old Shareware games will play. It's pretty cool.

Mine, and I think most of them, came with a NEC v20, which is 8088 compatible, and runs at the same clock speed, but is somewhat faster due to some optimizations. You can see it on benchmarks that compare to a standard PC/XT. For that reason, I swapped it out for a genuine 8088 so that software that assumed PC/XT speeds would run at the correct speed. I did get an 8088-2 so I could still use the turbo feature if I needed it, though.

When you swapped out the 8088, what did you put in place of it? You mean an Intel 8088? Same speed I assume? I have my original ~1985 KayPro 8088 that my parents bought when I was a kid. I still have it, and I hook it up every once in a while and play some of the old games on it. I have a dual Pentium P2 that I use for most of my late 90s / early 2000s era video games. But to be honest, I haven't had time to play any of them... I've just been so busy with school, work, and my daughter. But I'm I might bust them out this weekend.

I am getting a little closer to getting my Micro 8088 up and running. I got the Back Plane finished, tested and working, got the Pico Power Supply plugged in and mounted with the power port bolted to the back of the case. I got the Bios EPROM, Keyboard PIC and Memory Manager Chip, back from Sergey (he programmed them for me) and they are installed. I should get the NEC V20-16 in tomorrow, with that installed the 8088 card should be functional - I will still be waiting on the 8087-1 but that is really optional. I built the wiring harness for the case speaker, activity front panel LED, the Power LED, the power Switch and the front reset switch, I just need OSHpark to get me the boards to complete that. I think the floppy I got is bad - I bought it from eBay as "untested" which we all know is code for does not work, but I rolled the dice and lost on this one. I have another NOS on the way. Now I just need my XT-IDE Compact Flash card and Trident 9000i video card parts to get here and this should be a working system. I would like to add a RTC module/board in the future, but it is not mandatory to make the system usable, I can not wait to get the internet BBSing going on this machine.

That Atari PC looks amazing - I never saw one of those.

I have an IBM 5150 and Compaq Portable in pieces on my workbench. 😛 And also a Gateway 2000 386/33c in a nonfunctional state (likely related to a corroded CMOS battery on an otherwise squeaky clean board, I suspect). For systems that actually work, I also have a Panasonic Sr. Partner, and an AST Advantage 486 (I forget the exact model) that's kitted out with RAM but needs proper video and sound cards. That one boots to Win95, though, so I don't know if it counts. (In a similar vein, I still have my old Compaq Armada laptop.)

For pure DOS systems, I have self-built AMD 5x86-133 (basically a clock quadrupled 486DX -- 133mhz CPU, 33MHZ bus). Cirrus Logic VLB video card, SB16 + Gravis Ultrasound ACE for sound.

I have two old DOS machines I use to play some old games. My first is an Atari PC1. I remember these systems on sale in 1987/88, and I did think about buying one then, as I had an Atari ST and could have used my existing Atari 3.5 inch floppy disk drive and Atari mouse with it, but in the end I didn't like the lack of expansion, so ended up buying an expandable 286 (albeit a couple of years later). The PC1 is an 8088 based XT clone clocked at 8Mhz, 512K of RAM (expandable to 640K) and a graphics chip set capable of CGA, MDA, Hercules and EGA. I got this PC1 from Germany a few years back. Badly discolored and missing the keyboard. But I've be able to retro bright it, and scored an original Atari 84-key keyboard from B&C Computervisions. I also developed an internal ISA expansion adapter for it, that takes two small ISA cards. So this PC1 has been expanded with an XT-IDE card booting DOS 6.2, and an OPL2 Adlib card. The Commodore 1084 monitor cannot handle "hires" EGA mode, but most of the EGA games seem to stick to 320x200 mode, and that does work. My second DOS machine is a Tandy 1000HX. I got this as I was curious about Tandy graphics and sound. I also wanted to experience CGA on a composite color monitor, which the Atari PC1 does not support. I don't remember the Tandy 1000 being sold in the UK (I am told it was offered) as Amstrad dominated the low-cost PC clone market in the late 80s/early 90s. It also is 8088-based and I think clocked at 7.16Mhz. It feels noticeably slower than the Atari, but that might be perception. I should run Checkit on both systems and measure. I added the Rob Krinecki 3-in-1 expansion adapter with 640K RAM, an XT-IDE card and a serial port. The machine came with the internal 640K card but I have taken this out as the XT-IDE is much more useful. I am impressed with Tandy graphics and sound. Not as good as EGA and Adlib but not far off. Games look and sound a lot better than CGA with the stock beeper. I plan to find a joystick for it and try out some of the old games with the joystick.

I never thought I would build a DOS gaming machine - but I saw the Micro 8088 project and thought it was neat. I get to truly build my own PC, not by plugging boards into an old PC but from the chip level. So I am currently building out a system - I am going to use the NEC V20 processor and a 8087-1 math co processor. Here is a photo of the 3D printed case, I printed and a Sound card installed (I did not build the Sound Card) - I am still waiting on some of the parts (so many parts) I ordered to get here.

Thanks for starting this club! One of my projects during "lockdown" back in 2020 was to build a DOS gaming machine. I grew up with DOS, and while DOSBOX and PCEM are fine solutions, they aren't 100% accurate, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to set up a machine in the corner of my office when I feel like playing some good old DOS games. It's a bit of a pain to get good parts here in Japan, but I lucked out when searching on Yahoo Auctions and got a great deal on a tested motherboard complete with CPU (P133), video card, and RAM, so from there it was pretty easy to get a working system up and running. I even managed to find a nice little 13" CRT monitor for next to nothing. I already had a Roland MT-32 and Sound Canvas (I was using them with DOSBOX/PCEM), so it was just a matter of finding a case, floppy drive, CDROM drive, and decent sound card. After doing some research, I went and got an ESS Audio Drive on Ebay, and it's an excellent little card... no MIDI port glitch, excellent sound quality, and nice FM music. The most difficult part of the project was finding space! I ended up setting it all up on my printer stand in the corner, and it all just barely fits: I store the clipboard I use as a mouse tray under the stand when not in use, so it's very compact! Anyway, one nice thing about this system is that I can disable the caches to throttle the speed down to roughly 386/40 and 486/33 or so. This lets me play speed-dependent games like Wing Commander without having to fool around with mo'slo or whatever. It was a lot of fun putting it together, and even a lot of fun getting used to the quirks of DOS gaming again... but the most fun of course is playing DOS games! DOOM, Duke 3D, and Blood just feel so right on an actual DOS machine. However, I mostly use this machine to play RPGs, my favorite genre. I completed Ultima III and Lands of Lore, both for the first time, on this machine and had a blast playing them. Of course, it's not all wonderful. This hardware is getting old and difficult to maintain. The first CRT monitor I was using died, taking the video card out with it (or maybe the other way around). Most recently, my CDROM drive stopped reading discs, and finding a working replacement was actually pretty difficult; the one I got reads discs fine, but the tray is flaky.

It could be useful to add a software section to your list as well. A great place to find pretty much any flavor of DOS you'd like to run is here: WinWorld Operating System Library And of course the MS-DOS software library on Archive.org: MS-DOS Internet Archive I use PCem often: GitHub - PCem WinImage is a nice piece of software to read and create IMG floppy disk images. Great if you've got a Gotek drive. WinImage

Nice, Karl! I've got so many DOS PC's! I'll have to take the time to take some pictures and set a few more up that haven't been used for a while. It'll be fun to document all that and share pictures here once I take the time to do that. The Book 8088's are really cool. I've got two of them, one with CGA (version 1) and one with VGA (Version 2 with serial and parallel), and I added an 8087 to the CGA model. Both have an 8088 rather than the NEC processor. I've done some searching online and there are people who have modded them to use an external keyboard, something I may try to do in the future. There's also a resistor that can be swapped out to increase the brightness of the display. Definitely a cool hobbyist platform.

I have two systems that run DOS right now: one is a vintage HP 200LX palmtop, which is a genuine pocket-sized XT-compatible system with CGA running on a grayscale LCD screen. I love this device, but the screen presents challenges for old eyes, especially since it is not backlit. The other is a Book 8088, which is a new system meant to be a recreation of the original IBM PC with CGA graphics in notebook form. I swapped out the slightly faster NEC V20 with a genuine 8088 on mine.

Especially for Linux there is dosemu2, a very frequently updated DOS-emulator.

Here's a couple of other interesting dosbox forks: Dosbox-staging is fork that's been getting some buzz for better CRT and sound hardware emulation https://dosbox-staging.github.io/ And there's the "Dosbox-Pure" libretro core that seems to be attempted to turn DOS gaming into a more containerized experience by allowing you to encapsulate the entire installation directory and CD-ROM ISO dump into a single zip file that you can run. I like the idea of it, but to be honest it hasn't worked so well for me so far. https://docs.libretro.com/library/dosbox_pure/

This is an evolving list; I will add to it as I go. Feel free to suggest any I have missed! DOS and Other DOS Communities FreeDOS: An open-source re-implementation of DOS; mostly complete. DOS ain't dead: DOS-related forums. VOGONS: DOS, hardware, and emulation discussion. Dosgames Forum: DOS games discussion and more. DOS Emulation DOSBox: A DOS emulator with a focus on running DOS games. DOSBox-X: A fork of DOSBox with more of a focus on accuracy and completeness. Development DJGPP: DOS 32-bit development toolchain (runs on 368 or later, and produces code for 386 or later) Open Watcom: An open-source version of the classic Watcom compiler; reasonably modern and up to date. Runs on 386 or later, but can produce either 16 or 32-bit code. Vintage Borland C/C++: Various versions of the original DOS Borland C/C++ compilers. Vintage Turbo C/C++: Various versions of the original DOS Turbo C/C++ compilers. Vintage Microsoft C/C++: Various versions of the Microsoft C/C++ compilers. NASM Assembler: Free and open-source assembler for many platforms, including DOS.