Building a Retro PC From Bare Chips: Lessons From Hackaday Europe 2026

[Gensys]

Most “retro PC builds” are assembly projects: period-correct motherboard, ISA curios, a CRT, and patience. Jeroen Domburg’s Hackaday Europe 2026 talk goes a level deeper — designing a compact retro-class PC from components, with modern practicality, rather than scavenging a complete original board.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojQ9nnoR9uY

Write-up context: Hackaday Europe 2026 – Building A Retro PC From Scratch

Why build from silicon up?

• Original motherboards are finite and often damaged
• You can choose which “period compromises” to keep
• Modern power, storage, and I/O can be integrated intentionally
• The educational value is enormous — chipset lore becomes concrete

What this teaches even if you never fab a board

• How much “PC compatibility” is convention vs silicon necessity
• Where timing, bus design, and firmware still bite
• How homebrew hardware and retro software ecosystems enable each other

This is the same spirit as FPGA recreations and open chipset research: understanding enough to rebuild, not only to boot a thrift-store tower once.

Discussion

If you designed a one-board retro PC today, which era would you target — 486 gaming, early Pentium, or something more obscure — and what modern amenity would you refuse to live without?