By Tyler August
Publication Date: 2026-01-16 21:00:00
A lot of retrocomputer enthusiasts have a favourite system, to the point of keeping up 40 year old flame wars over which system was “best”. In spite of the serious, boring nature of the PC/AT and its descendants, those early IBMs have a certain style that Compaq and the Clones never quite matched. Somehow, we live in a world where there are people nostalgic for Big Blue. That’s why [AnneBarela] built a miniature IBM PC using an Adafruit Fruit Jam board.
If you haven’t seen it before, the Fruit Jam board is an RP2350 dev board created specifically to make minicomputers, with its two USB host sockets, DVI-out and 3.5mm jack. [Anne] loaded a PC emulator by [Daft-Freak] called PACE-32 than can emulate an IBM compatible PC with an 80386 and up-to 8 MB of RAM on this particular board. The video is VGA, 640×480 — as god intended– piped to a 5″ LCD [Anne] picked up from AliExpress.
That display is mounted inside a replica monitor designed by…