When you run into old hardware you cannot restore, what do you do? Toss it? Sell it for parts? If you’re [TME Retro], you hide a high-end mini PC inside an Amstrad-shaped sleeper build.
The donor laptop is an Amstrad ALT-286 with glorious 80s styling that [TME Retro] tried to save in a previous video. Even with help from the community there was no saving this unit, so we can put away the pitchforks and torches. This restomod is perhaps the best afterlife the old Amstrad could have hoped for.
At first [TME Retro] was going to try and fit an iPad Pro screen, but it turned out those don’t have the driver-board ecosystem the smaller iPads do, so he went with a non-retina LCD panel from Amazon instead. Shoving an LCD where an LCD used to live and sticking an expensive mini-PC inside a bulky 80s case is not the most inspiring of hacks, but that’s not all [TME Retro] did.
First, they were able to save the original keyboard, thanks to the longevity of the PC/AT standard and a PS/2 dongle — after all, PS/2 is essentially AT with a different connector. Then they produced what has to be the world’s highest-bandwidth parallel-port dongle by routing the two gigabyte network ports through the original 25-pin connector. USB is a serial bus, so breaking out two USB ports via the pins one of the old serial ports makes thematic sense. The second serial port is set up to take a PS/2 mouse instead of the serial mouse you might have used in the 80s. USB-C is still available via an adapter that went into the original expansion slot.
We’ve seen this sort of modding before, of course, on everything from 1980s vintage Mac Classics and LCD-386 portable PCs to 1990s Jellybean iMac G3s, to the internet-famous Hotwheels PC. It’s always sad to see old hardware fail, but arguably these casemods are a lot more usable to their owners than the original hardware could ever be in 2025.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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