Are you guys confusing the picogus and the picoMEM? The picoMEM claims to have wifi NE2000 support, I haven't seen that for the picogus.

@keenerb -- Evidently so: https://texelec.com/product/picomem/ looks like the way. In that X post, RetroTech Chris refers to his as picogus, and I think that's where I started my confusion. Thank you for clearing this up.

@jakfish: The board from RetroTech Chris's picture looks like a PicoGUS femto to me: https://www.tindie.com/products/polpo/picogus … and386-and-isa/

Hey, that looks right, too 😀 I'm addled once again. So I just PM-ed FreddyV to ask which to buy, with fingers crossed that they're available somewhere. Will post back if I hear something.

Jake

The prototype code for PicoGUS which adds support for NE2000 can be found here: https://github.com/yyzkevin/picogus

Edit: I hope polpo start making the PicoGUS femto edition again, I will definitely buy one when it's available.

kagamma wrote on 2024-05-20, 13:31:

The prototype code for PicoGUS which adds support for NE2000 can be found here: https://github.com/yyzkevin/picogus

The main page makes no mention of it on PicoGUS which is what leads to the confusion, I think. It's buried here https://github.com/yyzkevin/picogus/tree/main/sw/ne2000 in the software stack if anyone's interested. Since I didn't see any comment about it anywhere in the FAQ, README, or otherwise it wasn't readily obvious. Fortunately there was a new commit for NE200 support which, while it didn't immediately make sense on a visual scan, within context provided a clue.

@Inhibit Thanks for the clarification.

Got mine about a week ago (along with the ISA expansion etc.)
Love it for the most part but a couple questions for the people here who have them...

1. Half the time when I turn it on, it just shows No signal. Not sure if this is a bios reset issue others have noted or what but it's rather annoying to have it be a 50/50 if it'll turn on. I'm in the middle of moving so I haven't had a chance to hook it up to a VGA monitor to see if it displays there when showing No signal or what...

2. Has there been an enclosure designed for the ISA expansion? Looked across google and various 3d print sites and haven't seen anything yet...

drmadison wrote on 2024-05-20, 18:04:

1. Half the time when I turn it on, it just shows No signal. Not sure if this is a bios reset issue others have noted or what but it's rather annoying to have it be a 50/50 if it'll turn on. I'm in the middle of moving so I haven't had a chance to hook it up to a VGA monitor to see if it displays there when showing No signal or what...

I have not seen that behavior with mine, it always displays something when I hit power.

drmadison wrote on 2024-05-20, 18:04:

1. Half the time when I turn it on, it just shows No signal. Not sure if this is a bios reset issue others have noted or what but it's rather annoying to have it be a 50/50 if it'll turn on. I'm in the middle of moving so I haven't had a chance to hook it up to a VGA monitor to see if it displays there when showing No signal or what...

2. Has there been an enclosure designed for the ISA expansion? Looked across google and various 3d print sites and haven't seen anything yet...

I see it less frequently than that but have seen the behavior. Given the other problems people have corrected I would guess looking to make sure *all* the resistors have the right value might turn up another one. Or it's just missing a capacitor somewhere. (edit) Mine has a revision 1.2 sticker on the bottom.

What kind of enclosure are you looking for? I was thinking the same thing... I may start by whacking out a bottom plate as balancing the bare circuit on my leg makes me uncomfortable.

For those that are choosing to double-boot into Win 95 and WFWG, I found a couple of helpful Win3.1 programs:

Date, Time, etc in the window titlebar: https://archive.org/details/clock_202109

Uptime in its own window: https://archive.org/details/win3_tinyutil (easy to alt-tab to, painful to watch how little uptime you get 😀 )

Inhibit wrote on 2024-05-21, 15:00:

What kind of enclosure are you looking for? I was thinking the same thing... I may start by whacking out a bottom plate as balancing the bare circuit on my leg makes me uncomfortable.

Was surprised I couldn't find a 3d printed "case" to hold the ISA board and at least smaller ISA cards. I suppose I could try my hand at designing my first 3d printed object myself after I finish my move in a couple weeks if nothing else exists...

I got a li-po cell of the same capacity with the one inside pocket 386, although the dimensions are different (124065, a bit thicker) so it cant fit nicely into the slot.
Decided to test it against the one in my unit to see if it can improve my uptime.
The test: Open Borland Pascal 7 IDE and leave it there for 1 hour.
- The one inside pocket 386: From 100% down to 52%
- The new one: From 100% down to 58%.

@kagamma Interesting. What's your opinion so far? The new one may need some calibrating but your initial results, unfortunately, seem very similar. Here's hoping the new one ends up producing more juice. Thanks for posting the numbers.

^Hi, I'm not exactly sure what CPU core is being used, but some 386 variants had support for power-saving measures (386SL?).

If this 386 system does support HLT instruction or APM, utilities like wqghlt.386 (Win3x Enhanced), AmnHLT.vxd or Rain or Wincooler (Win9x, Me) or DOSIDLE (DOS) can help to extend battery lifetime.

I don't think APM is available (but I'm not familiar with HLT) since there is no suspend/screen-blank available. The screen can't even be dimmed, AFAIK.

Ah, I forgot about the screen. 😅
Yes, the screen/back light will likely not be affected and continue to draw same power either way.

I got the impression it was most similar to AMD 386 in CMOS as to the halt/suspend states. The intel SL is a whole ball of wax, chipset and CPU so is a platform similar to centrino rather than a CPU.

Looks like the Serial card and dongle are sold out on the Alibaba site. Anyone see them for sale anywhere else?

On another note, I wonder if someone could come up with a 3d printed docking station which has all the full sized ports on the outside, and attaches flush to the back of the laptop to one or more of the pins on the back.

Btw, I tried to force the cirrus logic chip to display 800x480 in Power Strip but the custom resolution was greyed out. Anyone else have any leads?

Looks like it has support for advanced power managment features. Here's the processor manual. https://www.dmp.com.tw/app/webcamera/pdf/m6117d.pdf See page 16.

No idea if the system's exposing any of that. Although I didn't notice it needing pins on the CPU and the description sounded software based for DOS.

The DM&P itteration was possibly the last production 386 design (circa 2000) so I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it has more power saver options.