Man, I never thought I’d be messing around with anything this old. You see the title—FIFA World Cup Final 1986 Hero!—you probably think I’m some kind of massive football nut. Not really. I mean, Maradona was the man, sure, but this whole thing started because I was trying to clear out my attic. I was tripping over boxes up there, trying to find a decent air filter for the AC unit.
I swear, I had forgotten half the junk I had stored. That’s when I stumbled onto it: an ancient, dusty PC case, heavy as a brick, sitting behind a forgotten suitcase full of tax returns from the early 90s. I nearly pitched the whole thing right into the dumpster. But something told me to open it up first. You know how it is, that little voice telling you maybe there’s some weird piece of hardware or some valuable artifact inside.
The Initial Mess and the Discovery
I dragged the tower downstairs, and the smell of old dust and ozone hit me instantly. Took me a solid hour just to get the side panel off. It was jammed shut. I had to use a crowbar—seriously, a rusty old crowbar—just to pry that ancient sheet metal away. Inside? A disaster. Wires everywhere, caked in grit, probably from the last century.
I started pulling components out, just to see what was salvageable. I yanked out the old floppy drives, the massive power supply unit that probably could run a small village, and then I hit the motherboard. It wasn’t even a standard modern board, obviously. It had these huge chips, all socketed, and I was just trying to figure out what the heck it was. I was ready to scrap the whole thing, except for one thing I found tucked into an old drive bay, wrapped in a brittle plastic sleeve:
- A yellowed plastic 5.25-inch floppy disk.
- Handwritten label, barely legible: MARADONA KICKS.
- A small, corroded ISA expansion card next to it, maybe a sound card.
That was it. That little disk. That got me thinking about 1986 and how raw computing was back then. I wasn’t even focused on restoring the junk PC anymore. Now I was obsessed with running whatever was on that disk and seeing what this game was all about. I knew if I tried to power up that old machine, it would probably explode or melt my fuse box. So I started hunting for parts I could actually use to bring the spirit of that era back, but without the fire risk.
Scavenging and the Headache of Compatibility
My first move was to try and read the disk. That was the first big wall I slammed into. Finding a working 5.25 inch floppy reader that didn’t sound like a dying lawnmower? Forget about it. Even if I found one, how was I supposed to connect it to anything modern? I spent three days on forums, trying to figure out if I could hook up some modern USB crap to this ancient interface. I couldn’t. The technology gap was just too wide.
So, I pivoted. Forget the floppy drive for now; I decided to build a dedicated emulator box—a simple, cheap setup—but I wanted it to feel 1986. I needed that visual authenticity. I drove down to the electronics recycling yard near the highway. I pulled out three busted monitors until I found a small 14-inch CRT that still had some flicker of life left in it. It was heavy, smelled like burnt plastic, but the price was right (free, because I told the guy I was using it for “art”).
Next up, the brains. I didn’t want a standard PC; too clean. I bought a used, low-power NUC from some auction site. It took three weeks to arrive, and when it did, the power adapter was missing. Typical. I spent another forty bucks on a universal power brick that had about 80 different interchangeable tips. None of them fit perfectly. I had to use electrical tape to hold the connection steady. It looked like a certified fire hazard, frankly, but it powered up.
The Software Grind and Wiring Everything Up
Getting the software running was just as messy. I finally managed to image the floppy disk using a friend’s ancient setup—it turned out the “MARADONA KICKS” disk was some kind of ancient, blocky management simulation mixed with a really ugly arcade kicker. I also grabbed a copy of the Kick Off ROM just for comparison, since I knew that was the real deal back then. I committed. I tried installing an older, lightweight version of Linux—not Debian, nothing fancy, I went with some specific retro gaming distro that was probably abandoned by the developers back in 2010.
That installation process was brutal. Dependencies were missing, the video drivers kept fighting the CRT resolution, and every time I adjusted the aspect ratio, the whole thing would crash back to a command prompt. My wife kept asking why the basement smelled like hot solder and swearing every night. I just told her I was “archiving history” and that it was necessary suffering.
I had to learn how to tweak the config files manually, just to make sure the 320×240 resolution stretched correctly across the ancient screen without blurring everything. I spent maybe six hours straight staring at hex codes, trying to understand why the generic USB joystick inputs weren’t registering correctly. I ended up buying three cheap USB controllers, ripping the guts out of one, and soldering the buttons directly to a repurposed keyboard encoder board. It was complete overkill, messy, and probably voided every warranty imaginable, but I needed that proper clicky feeling.
Victory, Blocky and Beautiful
Finally, after two solid weeks of cursing and squinting at ancient hardware, I hit ‘Run.’ The screen flickered violently. The awful synthesized MIDI sounds came blasting out of the tiny salvaged speaker I hooked up. And there it was: a blocky sprite representing Maradona, kicking a square ball across a green field in my terrible, scavenged setup. It looked terrible. It played horribly. But damn, it worked. The whole setup is a nightmare of mismatched hardware, electrical tape, and frustration, but when that digital crowd cheered—a sound I hadn’t heard since I was a kid—it was worth the whole headache. It felt like I wrestled 1986 back into existence, even if it was just for one terrible, blocky game. Don’t ask me how much I spent, but the satisfaction of seeing those pixels light up on that old CRT? Priceless.