Japanese PC-98 games have an aesthetic that’s so unique. There’s this one Twitter account that posts images from visual novels from that era and they all look so pretty: https://x.com/PC98_bot Also on bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/pc98bot.gang-fight.com

Just use a fabrication service. You can't readily make plated through holes and vias at home. The services do a much better job than any hobbyist level tinkering can achieve.

For the 2D version, you might not need very much custom. Use a regular pen plotter and use a pen with conductive ink. These both exist today, though personally as a hobbyist PCB designer, I can get 2-layer and 4-layer boards cheap enough from JLCPCB or Oshpark or PCB Unlimited that I don't bother trying to make them myself.

Bad Obsession Motorsport actually went this route, you can see their custom printer on their youtube[1] channel

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzrZoVKT8gM

wirewrap circuit construction would be more reliable. However high speed (if needed ) could be a problem ? from crosstalk.

One maybe unrecognized problem, of breadboards is not so good for high speed digital circuits due to capacitance

For $2,500 the Carvera Air makes very nice 2 sided pcbs with solder mask. Though even in raw materials it is hard to match a finished board from China if you can wait a couple of months.

My last job had a desktop CNC called Volterra I think. It would squeeze out conductive ink, bake it, drill holes, and lay down and reflow solder paste.

It was expensive and performed terribly.

I think there really isn't any good way to improve on breadboards. Breadboards, in fact, are the improvement. They're called breadboards because we used to literally drill pieces of wood and do wire-wrap construction on the other side.

Breadboards are good enough for the kind of prototyping they're for. Spring loaded contacts are about the best you can get for removable parts. The signal integrity isn't that bad at modest speeds.

In today's world, the next step up from a breadboard is custom PCBs. You can have a set of five shipped from China for the same price as a set of breadboards. There's no real need or reason for anything in between so long as PCB manufacturing is so disgustingly cheap and fast.

I'm pretty sure if you really want to, you could do something like this as a hobbyist with a Pentium right now.

Instead of futzing with wires on a breadboard you could simply designing a PCB up front, throw the design over the fence at JLC or PCBWay, insert coin, wait patiently at the mailbox, solder your scavenged Socket 7 onto the board.

The days of toner transfer and aquarium pumps are already long gone. Getting production quality, one-off, multi layer PCBs done as a hobbyist is dirt cheap these days, no government budgets required.