There was a time when building your own computer indicated a great deal of soldering or cable wrapping. At some point, though, building a PC has come to indicate getting a motherboard, a power supply, as well as just plugging a few wires together. There’s nothing wrong with that, however [Scott Baker] wished to truly develop a PC. He put together an Xi 8088, a style from [Sergey] who has lots of fascinating jobs on his site. [Scott] did a excellent develop log plus a video, which you can see below.

As the name implies, this isn’t a contemporary i7 powerhouse. It is a traditional 8088 PC with a 16-bit backplane. On the plus side, nearly whatever is traditional through-hole parts, excepting an optional compact flash socket as well as part of the VGA card. [Scott] obtained the boards from the Retrobrew forum’s stock of boards where forum individuals make PCBs offered for jobs like this.

If you try to duplicate [Scott’s] project, you can discover a few ideas from reading his posts. For example, he discovered that the resistor SIPs on the CPU board were a bit taller than the IC sockets. The lesson is to set up the sockets first.

Scott didn’t utilize a typical 8088 chip, however rather a NEC V20 which was a typical upgrade back in those days. In addition to the backplane as well as CPU card, [Scott] likewise developed a floppy controller board, a noise card, a compact flash reader, as well as a VGA board.

There’s a specific amount of cachet to building a PC, even an old-fashioned one. We might be lured to develop one to hook as much as a few of the old printer port gear we still have hanging around, too.

While the 8088 isn’t a supercomputer, that just indicates you have to hack harder. particularly if you want to go at 8088 MPH.