Mr. Green Upcycles a Discarded Firewall Appliance Into a FreeDOS Gaming Powerhouse
With old x86-based firewalls being taken out of commission, the time is ripe to build a low-power high-performance DOS gaming machine.
Semi-anonymous maker and YouTuber Mr. Green, of Mr. Green's Workshop, is looking to combine environmentally-conscious upcycling with vintage gaming — by turning discarded firewall appliances into DOS retro gaming machines.
"The journey with this device started [with my] BIOS post card project." Mr. Green explains, referring to a Raspberry Pi Pico-based tool for visually decoding errors in x86 hardware's Power-On Self Test (POST). "I found an old x86-based firewall in an online auction and was wondering what I could do with it. There were some unpopulated components on each side of the motherboard."
Investigating those unpopulated solder pads, Mr. Green discovered that they were for hardware normally present in an x86 PC but not required for a firewall appliance: a video output for the graphics hardware built into the system-on-chip and a SATA port for storage.
Adding the missing hardware turned what was previously e-waste into a fully-functional machine — plenty powerful enough to play classic games like Id Software's 1993 first-person shooter Doom and 3D Realms' 1996 rival Duke Nukem 3D using the FreeDOS MS-DOS compatible operating system.
There's only one problem: a lack of sound, something Mr. Green plans to fix in a follow-up video. "My main goal is to give some ideas on how old x86-based PCs or firewalls like these can be modified and reused," he explains. "I believe sharing know-how or open-source projects like this will help reduce electronic waste and support the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals, proposed by the UN]."
More information is available in Mr. Green's video.
