DIY mini-ITX motherboard lets you play DOS games without emulation — ITX Llama features a Vortex86EX 500 MHz CPU

Earlier this month, a mini-ITX board tailor-made for DOS gaming began catching the attention of enthusiasts around the web— the ITX Llama project, which is a custom mini-ITX motherboard built for use with the Vortex86EX CPU, actually has its roots back as far as October 2023 on the Vogons Forum. In the time since, original creator Eivind Bohler has gone on to open group-buy lists, open source the project (though getting your hands on the requisite hardware seems near-impossible), and get the board into the hands of YouTuber James Mackenzie.

A video from James Mackenzie uploaded three weeks ago highlights this board’s significant features and concerns. While the single-core Vortex86EX CPU isn’t era-accurate, it’s still a 300-500 MHz chip with support for several features you would want in a modern DOS-focused gaming build, most notably support for classic sound cards with the requisite custom BIOS for the ITX Llama.

So, how well does it play DOS games? Pretty well! While the new hardware is faster than anything of the era, several DOS games, like DOOM, have game logic that works independently of framerate, so not only do they run with all the original features intact, but they are also in line with much faster PCs than most of the time (43 FPS in Doom, 30 FPS in Quake).

Unfortunately, other games like Wing Commander have game logic tied to framerate and CPU speed. This means that you have to manually downclock the processor to 100 MHz in the BIOS, which approximates an Intel 386 but fixes the sped-up game issue that would otherwise emerge if you played the game on too-fast hardware.

Overall, the ITX Llama is quite an impressive showing—though, as many commenters on the James Mackenzie YouTube overview point out, getting your hands on it without having to make your own is pretty much his point. The timeline given with the original forum posts does indicate that there was an Octogroup-buy and that all boards had been shipped by January 4, 2024. You can still follow the GitHub page‘s instructions if the idea of such a project isn’t too daunting.