LGR - The Wee Little weeCee PC, see?

Hey all I just posted over in the Community section but I have a batch of these almost ready for shipping if anyone is interested.

Matt Perry

Oh man a complete computer with built-in drives and a monitor. You could even fit it onto your lap I bet. They could call it a laptop! Heh, but seriously I agree. A little modern retro PC cube would be rad.

LGR

Whacky Wheels

Kinguslearus

What was that Apogee racing game that looked like a clone of Mario Kart?

Jurassic_Jacob

Making one of these the size of a Playstation or a Gamecube could include a bunch of extras, like all those extra ports and buttons, a floppy drive, a 3D accelerator and possibly even its own built-in monitor. Granted, the price would shoot through the roof but size-wise it'd still be much more convenient than building an actual old PC if you're pressed for space.

Pablo Rodriguez

Love this general idea. I’m wanting a retro computer with a serial port, and something along these lines might be easier than trying to source original parts.

Chad Armstrong

A seriously neat device. I put in a few requests in the UK for pricing on the chip. About £170 for that delivered, plus the cost of the board and parts it's a pretty expensive endeavour. Hopefully someone will start producing the boards to help get the cost down as I'd love to have one of these.

Mat Cooper

neat!

Evan B

Heh, somehow I think it'd drive Ross nuts with the lack of 3D chip. No way to get that sexy antialiasing he craves!

LGR

Imagine the additional usability!

LGR

There are some faster PCI bus versions of the same SOM, I believe. It'd be great if one of those also has on-board 3D!

LGR

Sadly not, it's another one that refuses to start. Though hardly surprising knowing how particular that game is with CPUs and graphics chips!

LGR

That's an awesome little device. Fills a great niche, and can play most of the games I actually play on my current 98 box... Certainly worth keeping an eye on the project.

James Cheese

Oh, please, yes!

Jim Solblad

I neeeeeeeed theeee weeeeeeceeeee pleeeeease someone make it buyable! :-D

Jim Solblad

You had me at Civ II, but the real question is: Will it run POD?

Peter Metzger

pretty easily. You can take the idea of the ISA bus and run with it. Andy basically had to solve that problem by bringing it to the underside of the PCB through vias in order to connect the sound chip. GPUs I'm not so sure how it'd go. There are other variants with PCI as part of their spec, for example, this: https://www.icop.com.tw/product/SOM304RD-PI

I wonder if this could go the MiSTer route and do stackable boards, to accomplish things like PC Speaker, external GPUs, and the like. I imagine it would probably require a custom SBC solution to be able to have the access and lanes to do all that.

Honorary Octopus

Being a little older then you and having to endure the 90's with a bunch of low-end crappy PC-a I could only afford at the time I must say I hate old, loud PC speakers with a passion. Hate everything about those loud, irritant bastards, oh how I hate them, hate their sound when computer starts up, hate them even more when they try to play music or sound effects. The horror... Remember playing A-10 tank killer (or was it LHX attack chopper?) game that constantly plays awful PC speaker music and my table with PC on it was literally shaking. In any case any retro PC without PC speaker is OK in my book. Nice video BTW.

Milos Jovanovic

That is pretty close to my dream retro system. A slightly faster CPU; some breakout for power, reset and speaker; and some way to attach a 3D accelerator, and it would be perfect to relive my youth ^^

Benjamin Kleiner

Weeeeee for MS-DOS.

Deckard Games

Haha, WeeCee is the pronunciation of the Dutch word for toilet! :P

Roel Eppink

Oh, so LGR wouldn’t mind a few extra inches? 😉

Darryl Sell

Oh that is NEAT.

Alyxx the Rat

I actually just placed an order for 20 PCBs so I hope to have some of these available soon :)

Matt Perry

Here's my witty comment: be careful what you wish for! Your suggestions have a history of inspiring innovation.

Ryan Helinski

If anyone ever puts this up for sale I would buy one, although I expect it will not be "cheap".

yyzkevin

This is a pretty cool little project! I hope Andy makes it commercially available sometime.

Corey Ruth

Such a neat little thing! Though honestly one of my bigger takeaways is the newer motherboards that are compatible with older systems/hardware. I have my grandad's DOS 486 machine, but ages ago the battery popped on it and corroded it terribly. Being able to get a new motherboard that I could just pop the CPU, graphics card, and RAM into would be lovely. I'll have to look into that.

Bukkarooo

Honestly? I'd absolutely pay for the parts cost, no problem. That's cheaper than buying an eBay special today even. The problem is, that's a whole lot of labor to put in, and labor should be valued quite highly for something like this. Still, I definitely understand that there isn't anywhere near enough demand for scale to make any sense. :(

aetherspoon

The size is nifty. But I'd be okay with it being a bit larger if that meant it could have a power switch, reset button, power LED, and PC-speaker.

The 8-Bit Guy

I'm going through a bit of a tinified pc stage at the moment although most of what I've been up to's involved raspberry pi's so far. This thing looks neat though!

Andrew Kirkby

Oh man, there was a time in my career where I would have paid through the nose for a few of those... when I left in 2017 we had legacy software running on Win 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8 and maybe 10. And one of our CNCs ran a mini version of Win 95.

Jacob

I made a post on cost analysis on the Vogons forums, based on June 2021 numbers and based on the multiple orders that ballooned shipping costs. Many gains could be done in that regard but at least you can understand that it is NOT a cheap project. Someone frugal who would only be interested in hardware in order to run dos games could be better served with a trusty Pentium or 486 instead of this for much less, including a CRT. This post should make people understand the huge risk of offering this commercially. It's also how I found out it would suck just building one, so I made 2 with hopes of giving one out to my brother possibly, if he's interested. https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=967998#p967998

What I had:cheap amazon soldering kit with a cheap iron with a power control, RoHS (lead free) solder, flux paste. What I got in order to build my own 2 units of Weecee: Hakko FX888D temperature controlled soldering station, a hot air station for desoldering flat smt chips, better flux in gel Form, multiple sizes of desoldering wick, a USB microscope that has a flexible neck and leaded solder with flux cores and thinner diameter. I feel like I gained 30 levels of soldering and electronics experience and I was determined to see it through despite the rising costs of the components and equipment. I did it all back in June 2021. Before this project, my experience was mostly soldering and desoldering through-hole components before and did light repairs for Macintosh logic and analog boards (full recaps) but I finally learned the relationship between temperature, time, flux quantity and how much time you need to spend on solder points before your flux runs out. I forked Rasteri's project in order to touch up the faceplate and give it another name as well as add a MIDI svg icon near the gameport connector. Here's my fork on circuitmaker, where you can find a link to rasteri's original project, my own notes about the build of materials and links to some component's sourcing. https://circuitmaker.com/Projects/Details/MichalJuneau/weeCee-Mjuneau-v3 I loves my machines and use them weekly.

For me TheRasteri will always be "the person who did the very first Windows upgrade marathon video" before anything else so now I want to see how close to modern Windows this can go

Pietro Gagliardi

A great little system. If you search for "weecee" on google though, you might get some links about restrooms, as the name in dutch means toilet.

Erwin Bierhof

this thing would actually be perfect for me, currently i run windows 98 on a pentium 3 1ghz laptop, but that thing takes too much space and i cant place it anywhere nicely, this i could setup in a desk drawer and then drill a few holes for io and perfect. only if my budget can support such adventures. (thanks for showing me this thing so i can see if i can get one myself, idk if i can but now i know a path to follow for older gaming) Update, just learned no hes not selling em, sad face :c

CupcakeComrade

Someone please give one of these to Ross Scott.

Novel

Yeah I'd be completely outta luck there too if he hadn't sent me this one. So many teeny little components that I'm not confident enough/equipped to handle :/

LGR

Ever since I saw TheRasteri's newer video on the weeCee, I've been waiting for someone to start producing and selling this awesome little box. I'd do it myself, but I literally cannot solder. :(

aetherspoon

Long as it's got enough residential support nearby, it actually works! And hey, hopefully this leads you to some useful legacy hardware. There's a lotta nifty boards and interfaces out there.

LGR

I'm glad I'm not the only person who builds commercial zones dangerously close to industrial zones in SC2000. Also, I work in a steel mill and I still deal with a LOT of legacy systems. This thing wouldn't fix it but I really need to look into legacy support boards. We have a TON of stuff that still runs off ISA and the like and isn't compatible with new hardware.

Joe Conti