Where can I find MS DOS area hardware to build a retro gaming console that supports 3D graphics under $10 CAD? I already have a VGA monitor that I found in my room.
Welcome to our community Ethan! I’ve edited your topic title.
This kind of question is very hard to answer, and also very hard to have a discussion about (and discussions are what this forum centers on!). Can you provide us with more information to make it more tractable?
For one, the MS-DOS era was a solid fifteen years, and valid arguments could be made for a longer duration; for the first twelve to thirteen of those years (1981 to 1993, say – we could absolutely quibble about the details), 3D graphics that required anything other than a more-or-less basic framebuffer were unheard of in the gaming space.
Graphics hardware with any sort of 3D capability did not begin to appear in the desktop space in enough numbers to attract game development until the mid 1990s, with players such as 3dfx and S3 releasing desktop-class video cards with significant (4-16 MB!) texture memory and accelerators. This coincided with the move away from “DOS” gaming and into hybrid windowing-system games on systems like Windows 95 and 98, using Direct3D from Microsoft, OpenGL (originally from SGI), or hardware-specific drivers from 3dfx or the like.
I would expect a 3D-capable graphics adapter alone to run more than $10 on today’s open market.
That said, if you mean to play earlier games like Doom or Quake, Terminal Velocity, Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, and the other standouts of the early FPS era, those games were all designed to run on standard VGA framebuffer hardware, and do not require anything special. Fabien Sanglard’s fascinating articles and books shed some light on how this was accomplished; in particular, his Game Engine Black Books are really fantastic reads; I have both the i386 and i486 releases, and they are truly fascinating.
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You might find the $10 system, but video chips all seem to be made in house.
TI made some chips used in Arcade Games, but if you can find them they are not cheep. Many retro designs use fpga’s so custom hardware is easy to do.