Comment by tetraca
8 years ago
I had one at home, tinkering around and learning to program in QBASIC on it. I wish I still had it just to experience the certain charm of doing things the way you used to do them, but it sadly stopped consistently booting over a decade ago.
I'd pay $300 (maybe more) right now for a tiny, durably-housed (I'd be letting my kids use it) 486-alike machine with a smallish integrated-into-housing LCD and keyboard, and maaaaybe a mouse and an old-school joystick/pad or two, but their absence is in no way a deal-breaker, running legit MS-DOS 6.x or something 100% compatible (not sure how FreeDOS is on the compatibility front) with some reasonable solution for getting software onto it over USB or SDCard or something. And a foolproof factory-reset hardware switch. No moving parts a must.
I know this may not qualify as "durably housed" but maybe get your hands on an old Netbook or similar laptop? I'd probably give FreeDOS a try for the OS. It's still supported to some degree and is probably better than getting your hands on an old MS-DOS or DR-DOS that hasn't been touched in years. It was good enough for a couple of the major PC makers to ship it on a few models in later years.
You could build something for kicks but a laptop would be a lot easier and probably cheaper.
[ADDED: I have an old laptop I don't use for anything any more. I may give this a try myself.]
My kids are very young and there are three of them. I struggle to find time when my brain's not already totally fried to finish even simple 1-2 hour projects, let alone re-housing a laptop to be kid proof and fiddling to get DOS drivers working on it, as much fun as that kind of thing might have been to 5-years-ago-me. This many kids+full-time work is roughly equivalent to having a 90-hour-a-week job. I'd rather pay for a finished product—otherwise it'll never happen, and if I try I'll just have a mess somewhere in the house that I'll fiddle with for 30 minutes every few weeks, never making progress. Gotta pick my battles.
A Raspberry pi will do all of that. Emulating a 486 is no big deal these days. Otherwise, early Pentium laptops aren't hard to come by.