Yep, You Can Play DOS Games on an 86Duino Board
TheRasteri wanted to know if it could run DOS video games on an 86Duino One and presented his findings in a recent video.
Arduino is a trademarked brand of microcontroller (MCU) development boards. Raspberry Pi is a trademarked brand of single-board computers (SBCs). But there are several other companies producing both MCU development boards and SBCs. Some of them blur the lines between the two, such as the 86Duino One. That board has an Intel-compatible x86 processor and its own VGA graphics card. Naturally, TheRasteri wanted to know if it could run DOS video games and presented his findings in a recent video.
The 86Duino One isn’t quite an SBC or a MCU development board. It has user-programmable I/O pins like an Arduino, but users do not directly program an MCU. It’s more like a Raspberry Pi SBC, except for a few major differences: the x86 processor, the VGA graphics card, and a multi-PCB arrangement. Instead of a single PCB, 86Duino has two modules (the SoC and the VGA card) on a carrier board with Arduino-style headers. The Vortex86EX is an SoC (System-on-Chip) that contains a 300MHz 32-bit x86 processor, 128MB (86Duino One) or 1GB (86Duino One Plus) of DDR3 RAM, LAN, USB 2.0, and a MicroSD card interface. The carrier board has a PCI-E bus, which is what the VGA card connects to.
Because the 86Duino has an x86 processor, it is compatible with Windows and DOS (instead of just Linux distros like most Arm-based SBCs). But as TheRasteri notes, most DOS video game compatibility comes down to the soundcard. DOS games expected a soundcard connected to an IBM PC’s ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) bus. Some DOS games will work without an ISA soundcard, but many require one.
TheRasteri’s solution was to develop an adapter for a PC/104 connector. He built that on a perfboard that plugs into the 86Duino’s I/O pin headers and connects them to the PC/104 edge connector that accepts soundcards. Actually configuring the I/O pins to work for an ISA bus requires tweaks to the BIOS, and instructions are available on Brad’s Electronic Projects page.
To load and play games, TheRasteri installed Windows 98 on the 86Duino. That has a DOS mode, but also has FAT32 support for larger file systems. With the ISA soundcard, this setup supports just about every DOS video game thanks to the powerful processor and VGA card. The framerate is great, as is the sound quality. Unfortunately, TheRasteri wasn’t able to get mice to work properly with the 86Duino and so it is only good for games that work entirely with the keyboard or a gamepad.