Retro PC Shop's repair bench makes you discharge the PSU capacitor first, and a capacitor soldered in backwards goes bang
A free, PS1-looking shop sim set in 1997 now walks you through real repairs with a multimeter, soldering iron and desolder pump. Every mistake lowers the odds the part lives, and you can run the shop with up to five friends.
“A faulty part from the bazaar is no longer fixed with one click,” the developer, d4m1x, wrote in the October 24 devlog that brought the Windows and Linux builds up to date with the browser version. “A guide walks you through it like a real repair.”
The list of jobs reads like a weekend at a 1990s repair counter. Swap a bulging capacitor. Find a blown fuse in a PSU, “discharge C1 first!” Rub the oxidation off RAM contacts with isopropyl. Straighten bent CPU pins. Oil a grinding fan. “Every mistake lowers the chance it comes back to life,” d4m1x writes, “and a capacitor soldered in backwards goes BANG.”
The repairs feed the rest of the game. Customers walk in with a fixed price, a minimum performance score and sometimes a wish (“It has to be small!”, “No slow HDD!”), and you walk the shop buying from eight shelves of CPUs, boards, RAM, cards, drives, power supplies, coolers and cases. The game page says it checks “CPU socket, DDR4 vs DDR5, case size (ATX / mATX / Mini-ITX), cooler headroom, PSU wattage and graphics card length,” which means the shop founded in 1997 stocks DDR5 (nobody tell the customers). Beat the target by 25% and you get a tip. Rent goes up every day. The goal is “$8,000 in the till to become the town’s IT tycoon. Or go bankrupt trying.”
A cheap broken part from the bazaar is how you keep the margins, and every one now goes through the guide.
The game went co-op the same day. The Friends Update lets you host your shop behind a four-letter code, and up to five friends get “the same money, shelves, orders and rent.” Two more workbenches wait in boxes in the warehouse, so a crew can take three orders at once, and “if two of you grab the same part, the faster one wins.” It’s all three.js, with wobbly PS1 vertices, an optional CRT filter, bossa nova on the in-game stereo, and English and Czech. The itch page’s AI disclosure lists code, graphics and text as AI-assisted. The desktop files are 110 MB for Windows and 139 MB for Linux, with no installer. What it doesn’t say is how many tries a backwards capacitor gives you before the part is gone for good.
PC-building sims usually sell the tidy half of the hobby: unboxing, slotting, cable management, a benchmark at the end. Retro PC Shop’s bazaar is the other half, the castoff that won’t power on and the question of whether it’s worth an afternoon with the iron. With rent due every night, that question has a dollar figure on it.
Retro PC Shop is still marked “In development.” The desktop build’s last line: “Have fun — and if something breaks, let me know in the comments!”