March 25, 2026
Solder, sweat, and Quake II
My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II
He hand-built a mini ’90s PC that runs Quake II, and the internet is cheering
TLDR: A solo maker built a new custom board that actually runs Quake II, complete with Wi‑Fi and a battery clock, and posted a video proof. The crowd applauds the skill, laughs through the $100+ PCB sticker shock, and debates whether the real win is the engineering—or that legendary ’90s soundtrack.
A lone hardware tinkerer just leveled up his homemade game machine, and the crowd is losing it. Petr Mikheev hand-soldered a new six‑layer board with a tiny “ball of dots” chip (BGA) and modern memory, then booted Quake II like it’s 1997. One commenter dropped the receipts — a demo video — and the thread went full standing ovation. The top vibe? Awe at the sheer grind from circuit sketches to a game actually running, plus sympathy for the wallet hit when you jump from cheap two‑layer boards to a pricey six‑layer build.
Fans loved the extras: Wi‑Fi via an ESP32 module, a tiny battery clock so Linux stops waking up in 1970, a video chip to keep colors clean, and even a boosted power option for hungry gadgets. In plain terms: he built a small, custom “computer” board that can be reprogrammed (that’s what an FPGA is), learned to wrangle newer, faster memory, and made it game‑ready.
The comment energy split into three camps: the craft nerds praising the soldering flex, the budget realists swapping “my first $100+ PCB” horror stories, and the nostalgia crew arguing the real star is that crunchy Quake II soundtrack. It’s dedication meets debit card pain, wrapped in retro vibes — and everyone’s here for it.
Key Points
- •The new board adopts an Efinix Ti60F256 FPGA and a 1 GB DDR3L (IM8G16D3FFBG) memory chip, both in fine-pitch BGA packages.
- •To handle DDR3L, the author used Efinix’s DDR3 Soft Controller Core and followed DDR3 layout guidance, implementing length matching and layer speed compensation.
- •The PCB was upgraded to six layers, with decoupling capacitors added as space allowed, constrained by a preference for 0603 sizes.
- •Hardware improvements include a TFP410 TMDS serializer, USB current limiting, SD line voltage switching for UHS‑I SDR104, an RTC with battery, an ESP32 Wi‑Fi module, and a second USB‑C port with voltage negotiation.
- •Manufacturing at JLCPCB revealed a major cost increase: six-layer boards cost over $100 per batch, versus $2 for a previous two-layer run, with little price difference between 5–20 units.