This Teeny-Tiny Raspberry Pi-Powered Desktop PC Is a Real Miniaturized Blast From the Past

Pseudonymous maker "fantasticmrdavid," hereafter simply "David," has turned a Raspberry Pi into a miniature facsimile of a vintage desktop PC — complete with working monitor and the ability to play classic games through the DOSBox emulator.

"[This is] a retro desktop PC style case I designed and 3D-printed based on an old 286 PC I grew up with," David explains of the project. "eSun Bone White PLA was the closest I could available in Australia that was a close colour match, but [I'm] totally open to suggestions if someone has something better; I really wanted the PrintedSolid stuff but they won't ship here."

The three-part main body of the machine, complete with a front panel which includes a sadly non-functional scale model of a 5.25" floppy drive, houses a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer and a cheap sound module with internal speaker.

Atop this is the monitor, which is built around a 3.5" HDMI-connected full-color LCD in a housing designed to look like a classic CRT display. "I also tried out a 2.8" LCD," David adds, "and while I got it working, found the DOS prompt unreadable at that size."

The Raspberry Pi is configured to boot a copy of Debian "Bullseye" Linux, which shows a faked Power-On Self Test (POST) screen before loading the DOSBox emulator — ready to play games like Id Software's classic first-person shooter Wolfenstein 3D or do a little productivity work in Microsoft's Windows 3.1.

"it was a super fun project," David writes. "[I] can confirm it also works for a [Raspberry] Pi Zero 2 W, but I have yet to find a keyboard and mouse combo that works with the Zero (or at least the USB hubs I've tried so far)."

More information is available in David's Reddit thread, while instructions and the 3D print files have been published to Printables under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.