This retro sleeper build hides one of the top mini PCs inside and I wish I had the tools and patience to game like it's the '90s

This Retro Laptop Hides a Secret - YouTube

Watch On

Sleeper builds will have a place in my home at some point, I swear it (if I keep saying it, it'll happen, right?). There's just something about the combined retro nostalgia of a knackered '90s PC combined with actual modern-day gaming chops. For all who feel the same, get a load of TME Retro's resuscitated Amstrad-ALT286 (via Hackaday) that's been hollowed out and reconstituted with a Minisforum UM890 Pro mini PC.

The Amstrad-ALT286 is a veritable relic that started to be manufactured 1990, featuring a whopping 640 x 480 resolution screen, 4 MB of RAM (yes, that's an 'M', not a 'G'), and 60 MB of hard drive storage (ditto). So, not capable of running much of anything these days, but my God is it beautiful. Just look at that chunky chassis.

Then there's the UM890 that TME Retro's slapped inside the Amstrad, and that's a thing of beauty in its own right, too. We haven't got our hands on the 800-series version, but the previous UM790 currently sits pretty on our list of the best mini PCs for gaming as the best for those on a budget.

The 890 looks to primarily have an updated CPU, but the GPU should be the same Radeon 780M, which means gaming performance should be just as good as we found it to be in our Minisforum Venus UM790 Pro review. Which means it should be pretty capable at 1080p.

So how exactly were these two eras smushed together? Not slapdash, that's for sure. The "awesome little retro sleeper" (as TME Retro puts it) required a lot of attention to get it ready for its new hardware.

First, its guts are well and truly cleared out, piece by piece, to make way for the new. The main questions, the tech YouTuber notes, were whether they could get a working screen in there and whether they could get a keyboard to interface with a modern PC. The answer to both questions was yes.

An LCD screen of the right size, along with a controller board, was found on Amazon, and after 3D printing some brackets it slotted in there just fine. The keyboard cable, thankfully, allowed for a PS/2 connector to be soldered, which then allowed a PS/2 to USB cable adapter to be used to connect it to the Minisforum PC.

That mini PC wasn't just plonked straight in there, either. It was taken out of its casing bit by bit, and then found its home inside the hollowed-out Amstrad after the latter's battery enclosure had been sawn to smithereens to make room for it.

The end result, after such shenanigans and yet more 3D printing and soldering, is a modern-day mini PC that's actually very capable of gaming sitting inside a gorgeous-looking retro monster. In addition to adding some USB-C ports and a headphone jack, the old serial and parallel ports have even been re-wired and used to connect USB-A and ethernet.

Bonkers stuff, but it's the kind of bonkers that I'm here for. Don't tell me you wouldn't want to boot up Deus Ex or some equally cyberpunk game on this thing… even Cyberpunk 2077 itself runs okay on the lowest settings, the YouTuber notes. Still, don't expect the entire world; it is a mini PC with integrated graphics, after all.