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Playing around with the Pixel x86 Mini

Published: Wednesday 2025-01-29

I got my hands on a Pixel x86 mini and have been playing around with it. If you've found yourself here I feel iike it's a safe bet you're already familiar with the device but if not it's a device based off of a Vortex86EX 466MHz x86 system on a chip. It's well suited for late 90's era computing and gaming but I was also interested in trying some other more modern operating systems on it.

Here's some links if you'd like to know more:

I chose a 3d printed body, without OS, the MINIPCIE-9160 VGA card which was the only one on offer as of the time of this writing, and the Pixel x86 MIDI using a Dream Midi chip.

Hardware review

CPU:

It's slow. Which is really a feature in this case, right? But it's slower than you might think for a clock speed of up to 466MHz. It doesn't support SSE or MMX, which makes it less performant than something of that era with a similar clock speed like Pentium II's. It also limits what you can run on it. Anything that supports a 486 as a target seems to be a pretty good rule of thumb. Which makes the aforementioned late 90's era computing a good target. It's a sweet spot for software and games of that era.

Video Card:

There aren't video card drivers specific to this device for Windows 98. With the Universal VBE Video Display Driver you can get 16 bit color depth at 1024x768. I've been running it at 800x600 at a 16 bit color depth and the redraw for moving windows or scrolling is notably poor, but not unusable. This is called out on the driver's site as an issue. I also got more reasonable performance in an X session on OpenBSD so that indicates to me that it's not a well supported configuration, more than the video card is lacking for this setup. This can be improved a little, which I'll get in to later.

Audio:

For audio playback, I played a 128kbps MP3 and sounded like it should to me. I didn't hear any cracking, hissing, distortion, etc. I chose a lower bitrate MP3 because I wasn't sure how well it'd run but the CPU's utilization was pretty low. I'll have to try a higher bitrate. Playing a MIDI via General MIDI to Dream MIDI sounded really good! Using the sound card's MIDI playback was mediocre, but nostalgic.

Network:

It worked after installing the provided driver in Windows 98 and out of the box with every other OS I've tried. In doing an unencrypted FTP transfer within my internal network it averaged about 47Mbps. I don't know if that's the fastest the network chipset can do or some other bottleneck, but that's more than plenty fast for it's purpose.

I/O:

• PS/2: I'm using a PS/2 keyboard and mouse for this. Works fine.
• USB: I've used it with thumb drives and tried a USB keyboard. No issues. I haven't tested a USB keyboard/mouse with a USB unaware OS yet.
• Gameport: I haven't used it yet and don't have any joysticks of this vintage. Though I know there are devices out there that convert modern USB gamepads to work as controllers for various systems. I think that's something I'd like to try. I also want to try hooking up an mt-32pi to it via a DB15 to MIDI converter.

Case:

As previously mentioned, I got a 3d printed plastic case. It is a very nice print. I don't see any elephant footing. The striations are barely visible. It has a nice texture to it. I suspect it has a 100% infill. The edges are all very clean. It's fastened with metal threads and bolts. I'm quite happy with it.

OS Installations

The system has an option to boot from an SD Card, a USB drive, or a virtual floppy (VFloppy) which is a preloaded Windows 98 boot disk image. The system will not boot ISO images written to a USB drive. As a result it seems you're limited to OS installs that can be started from DOS loaded from a floppy, or install media intended specially for a USB drive. Or install to the SD Card from another machine, such as a VM that has raw access to the SD Card.

Windows 98 SE:

There are Windows 98 SE installation files available on the pixelx86.com website and it indicates it already has extra drivers needed to access the SD Card. This almost certainly is a fair bit easier, but what's the fun in that?

Here's the process I went through to get that going. It may not be the best/most efficient way. Probably isn't, in fact.

• Use an unmodified Windows 98 ISO image and copy all of the files on the ISO to a FAT32 formatted USB drive.
• Grab all of the drivers listed on the Pixel x86 site, the Universal VBE Video Display Driver, and TBPLUS and extracted their various contents on to that drive as well. Note that the contents of PATCH.ZIP within TBPLUS.ZIP is what you'll need.

I noticed the video driver and TBPLUS listed below are all available here now. The following two links probably aren't nessesary but I'll keep them there just in case.

The TBPLUS copy I grabbed the day before writing this is now coming up 404. I also see TBPLUS.ZIP on that site archive. I assume it's the same but have not checked. The sha256sum of mine is fd23a9160a836d159ee6b6db48001761ad364a80555e2ca190f7ec2960777e18 if you'd like to verify.

• Boot the Pixel x86 Mini, which I'm going to refer to as "the Mini" from now on. Enter the BIOS by pressing F1 when prompted and make sure Disk Settings > USB as Fixed Disks is Enabled.
• Format an SD Card with a single FAT32 partition. I understand you don't want to use one larger than 32GB. I formatted it from the Mini. To do it that way insert the SD Card and turn on the Mini, press ESC when prompted for the boot menu, choose "3. Virtual floppy (Win98SE boot disk), then "Start computer without CD-ROM support.". Once you have a DOS prompt, run "fdisk" and create a single partition spanning the entire disk. Then run "format /q /s c:\" to create a system formatted disk (Not sure if the system format is needed or if Windows 98 setup would have taken care of it).
• Insert the SD Card (if not already) and the USB drive, (re)boot the Pixel, press ESC when prompted for the boot menu, choose "3. Virtual floppy (Win98SE boot disk), then "Start computer without CD-ROM support. "You should have DOS prompt with a C:\ drive pointing to your SD Card and a D:\ drive pointing to your USB drive.
• Type "cd d:\" then "setup.exe" to begin the installer and proceed through setup.
• At some point during the installation process it's going to reboot and get stuck early in the boot process. I would wait a good amount of time to make sure you're stuck, as opposed to it just being slow. 10 minutes, perhaps. Once you're certain it's stuck, press the reset button. Eventually it'll prompt you with some options. Choose "Safe Mode". After several minutes or more it will eventually come up.
• Open a dos prompt and navigate to the path on the D:\ drive where you stored the contents of PATCH.ZIP and run INSTALL.BAT. Reboot Windows and the installation should continue and eventually complete.

At this point I chose to install the network, and update Windows 98 via Windows Update Restored before doing anything else. Which is not ideal at 640x480 @ 16 colors but it's doable.

• Go do the Device Manager (Right Click "My Computer" > "Properties" > "Device Manager" and locate the Network Device with a ? and right click it then click "Properties". Go to the "Driver" Tab then "Update Driver". Choose to "Specify the location of the driver", check "Specify a location:" and browse to where you extracted the LAN driver. I think there was a reboot after this? But I didn't have to do any additional configuration to get an IP address from DHCP.
• Open Internet Explorer and navigate to http://windowsupdaterestored.com. Get familiar with the site and use it to update your installation.
• Updating your video card drivers is mostly the same as updating the network card drivers. The difference is you're looking for a VGA Adapter in Device Manager. And it won't show as an unknown device. Inside the Universal VBE Video Display Driver there are several directories. I chose the 032MB directory for drivers because it's the lowest possible value and their site indicates this is for "ANY cards, VRAM memory limited to 32 Mb." On the Pixelx86 site it indicates this card has 4MB of RAM. Once the driver is installed you'll be able to pick higher resolutions and color depths.
• There are instructions for the USB driver installation on the Pixelx86 driver page. It indicates to remove various devices and controllers. This is done via Device Manager which you should be getting familiar with if you weren't already. Just right click those devices and choose "Remove". Once that's complete run the provided executable.
• The Crystal Sound driver Windows 98 SE driver has a setup.exe installer. Run that to install sound card drivers.
• TODO: I see a UNISOUND DOS Sound Card driver popped up on the drivers page. I'll have to check that out.

At this point you should have a pretty usable Windows 98 installation!

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