mercator wrote on 2024-05-23, 15:54:

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?

Shouldnt be that hard, since the headers on the back are just IDC block headers.

How to have the 'port replicator' stay 'stuck' is another matter.

A much more interesting project would be a single ISA slot, (with DMA line bridge card inside the internal bay), into which a multi-IO card is inserted.

Plugs into the 12v barrel with a pico-psu, giving proper 12v and 5v rails, a small 2.25" drive bay,
a slim formfactor FDD, and a single ISA slot for an ISA multi-IO. (Turned on it's side, so that the ports all face the same side as the IDC lpt port, usb port, and CF slot, such that the card's dimensions roughly match the system footprint.)

Would give real serial, lpt, and game ports, and give provision for a real SSD/2.25" hdd + Floppy.

Would make it a lot thicker though.

https://texelec.com/product/picomem/

I heard back from FreddyV and he said "Kaede is working on a Book 386 version" and it's close to release.

I'm assuming FreddyV means "Pocket 386." He was very kind to respond to me, so I don't want to be a nuisance with another follow-up.

"PC-Speaker" driver for MS Windows, but for AdLib

Might be some use to y'all who want sound without attaching a physical sound card. It isn't going to wow you or anything but works quite nicely.

@Jo22: I ran DOSIDLE and it does not detect any APM features, so I guess it does not support them (or maybe it does, but the system does not expose it). The same goes for HLT instruction.

kagamma wrote on 2024-05-24, 18:34:

@Jo22: I ran DOSIDLE and it does not detect any APM features, so I guess it does not support them (or maybe it does, but the system does not expose it). The same goes for HLT instruction.

I'll be more comfortable messing around with compiling on (even an older) Linux platform. Now that I've got a toolchain to create CF cards for this thing I'll dig up an OS for it. Finding an old 386SX Linux OS stack, easily installable, isn't as trivial to do as I had thought.

re: usb drive woes (sometimes the P386 sees them, sometimes not) I found an odd workaround and I don't know why it works. A Verbatim 4gb and Sandisk Cruzer 16gb, both nano, store-n-stay, weren't recognized until in Rufus 3.20p, I installed freedos on both. With freedos installed, both drives came up immediately in the P386.

This is using FreddyV's better usb driver: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/poc … 0/#post-1380520

Any idea why this would work?

jakfish wrote on 2024-05-24, 21:13:

re: usb drive woes (sometimes the P386 sees them, sometimes not) I found an odd workaround and I don't know why it works. A Verbatim 4gb and Sandisk Cruzer 16gb, both nano, store-n-stay, weren't recognized until in Rufus 3.20p, I installed freedos on both. With freedos installed, both drives came up immediately in the P386.

Any idea why this would work?

Sounds likely to be MBR vs GPT partitioning.

That would make sense, as Rufus installs do play with the MBR.

I received my Pocket386 today. This one came with MS-DOS 6.22 and WFW 3.11 on it, no Win95. It came with a Serial Adapter board preinstalled in the Mini-ISA/GPIO slot underneath and a set of 3 adapters: Serial, Parallel, and the PS/2 & VGA combo. It has a clear transparent shell instead of dark colored.

The CF card is a 2GB TDK card which contained some DOS game demos, Turbo C++, Turbo Basic, FoxBase, and a few others along with some Chinese language utilities.

So far the RTC seems to be working ? The clock seems to be keeping proper time whether the device is turned on or off, but I've only been using it for one day, so we will see how that goes. I haven't taken it apart yet to see if the troublesome resistor is there or not (can't see because it is underneath the Serial Adapter board).

I used the updated USB driver mentioned earlier in the thread and can access data on a 32GB USB3 stick (I formatted a 500MB partition as FAT16). Reading works fine but writing does not work -- it freezes and corrupts the USB stick.

So far I have been enjoying re-creating the setup of my old 386 with QEMM, PC-Tools, DESQview, DOS Navigator, etc...

I have a complete backup of my PC from 1988 on 5.25" floppy disks that I've saved for all these years but never been able to read. I believe it was made by PC-Tools or Central Point Backup. I need to see if the disks are still readable using a greaseweazle or kryoflux. Just have to find a 5.25" drive that works. To be able to restore that and use it on Pocket386 would be amazing, I would probably die from the nostalgia overdose.

I don't own a CF reader so I'll need to order one. I'd like to make some HDD images in a VM (much easier to mount floppy disk images and install things that way) and then copy to CF to run it on the Pocket386. Maybe see if OS/2 Warp works, if drivers are not an issue. I know I ran it on a 386 with 8mb of RAM back in the olden days, and CF is probably going to be a hell of a lot faster disk i/o than my old Maxtor hard drive.

Congrats on the machine. I saw that your seller had a screenie of WFWG. If you're interested in Win95, here's the link for .gho Win95 cf restore: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wACekmlNkXoH … .35313e5fyECXyA

ghost64.exe didn't work for me on Win10, but ghost32.exe did.

32gb may be pushing the envelope, even with a small partition (I've never gotten repartitioning to work on any usb/P386).

You could try something that did work--installing freedos via Rufus on the usb. That freed up a Cruzer 16gb (a changed MBR?), but I was just experimenting with it and I crashed the 16gb usb when deleting a copied test file. Win10 didn't find errors, but I scanned/repaired it anyway, and that restored read/write (or maybe simply being read by another machine restored it). And further testing has not replicated the problem.

I've yet to have problems with a Verbatim Store-n-Stay 8gb. Though usb is a continuing adventure...

Inhibit wrote on 2024-05-24, 20:18:

I'll be more comfortable messing around with compiling on (even an older) Linux platform. Now that I've got a toolchain to create CF cards for this thing I'll dig up an OS for it. Finding an old 386SX Linux OS stack, easily installable, isn't as trivial to do as I had thought.

Please post how it goes. I'm thinking of getting one, but would only want to if I could run Linux on it (or BSD, Minix, etc.). I've seen people mention installing different versions of Windows, but haven't seen anyone installing Linux.

Inhibit wrote on 2024-05-24, 20:18:

kagamma wrote on 2024-05-24, 18:34:

@Jo22: I ran DOSIDLE and it does not detect any APM features, so I guess it does not support them (or maybe it does, but the system does not expose it). The same goes for HLT instruction.

I'll be more comfortable messing around with compiling on (even an older) Linux platform. Now that I've got a toolchain to create CF cards for this thing I'll dig up an OS for it. Finding an old 386SX Linux OS stack, easily installable, isn't as trivial to do as I had thought.

Slackware acceptable?

I found a very old version (1.1.2) mirror here.

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-1.1.2/

It DEFFO supports i386.

If you have an lpt based zip or jazz drive, it may be possible to bootstrap it, and install natively. (Since there is no 'real' FDD support, and this ancient bit of tech expects floppy drives)

Otherwise, prepping a VM with a properly decorated disk image, and prepping the device that way may be more workable.

It appears the full disk set (it might be easier to tell wget to clone that folder) includes gcc, make, and some others.

It may be possible to use it as a starting point (and working low-memory kernel) for backporting.

Slackware 8 is the latest/last to have i386 support, but may not play well with 8mb of ram.

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-8.0/

wierd_w wrote on 2024-05-25, 03:56:

Slackware acceptable? […]
Show full quote

Slackware acceptable?

I found a very old version (1.1.2) mirror here.

...

Slackware 8 is the latest/last to have i386 support, but may not play well with 8mb of ram.

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-8.0/

It is! I have no idea why I forgot Slack while thinking over old Linux releases. I'll fire up virt-manager and work my way back from 8.0 then post up a dd CF image once I get an acceptably old release going.

While it would make an i386 beg for mercy, the zram driver might be a useful thing to backport.

Just dont be stupid with it trying to use zstd, and instead use lzo. Even very modest compaction would be meaningful.

Gut feeling was saying it was too much for this machine, original authors of the compcache that became zram seem to imply that 486DX2-66 with 16MB would be pointless to run it on, it causing too much CPU load to get anything done, so one would presume you really only want to consider it on Pentium class with 32MB as minimum.

Inhibit wrote on 2024-05-24, 20:18:

kagamma wrote on 2024-05-24, 18:34:

@Jo22: I ran DOSIDLE and it does not detect any APM features, so I guess it does not support them (or maybe it does, but the system does not expose it). The same goes for HLT instruction.

I'll be more comfortable messing around with compiling on (even an older) Linux platform. Now that I've got a toolchain to create CF cards for this thing I'll dig up an OS for it. Finding an old 386SX Linux OS stack, easily installable, isn't as trivial to do as I had thought.

I tried to install Softlanding Linux System (SLS 1.0.3) on the 86box and write the image to CF card. It can boot on the Pocket 386. However, if you use a CF card larger than 540M, you need to turn off the LBA and manually fill in the hard disk parameters in the BIOS. At that time LILO does not support LBA(must less than 16 heads), but can correctly identify more than 1024 cylinders.

It was a bit difficult to find the complete SLS installation folder. I combined the files from SuperGlobalMegaCorp and Infomagic Linux CDROM to create a complete installation folder. So Slackware may be an easier option to install.

https://oldlinux.superglobalmegacorp.com/Linu … tributions/SLS/
https://archive.org/details/Infomagic_Linux_C … M_December_1993

mercator wrote on 2024-05-23, 15:54:

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?

RetroTester (zhblue) tried to support 800x480 by adding additional ModeLine to XFree 1.3. It was displayed in full screen, but the image seemed to have been stretched many times and became blurry.
It is possible that the LCD controller cannot Configure this resolution correctly.

wierd_w wrote on 2024-05-25, 03:56:

Slackware acceptable? ... Slackware 8 is the latest/last to have i386 support, but may not play well with 8mb of ram. […]
Show full quote

Inhibit wrote on 2024-05-24, 20:18:

kagamma wrote on 2024-05-24, 18:34:

@Jo22: I ran DOSIDLE and it does not detect any APM features, so I guess it does not support them (or maybe it does, but the system does not expose it). The same goes for HLT instruction.

I'll be more comfortable messing around with compiling on (even an older) Linux platform. Now that I've got a toolchain to create CF cards for this thing I'll dig up an OS for it. Finding an old 386SX Linux OS stack, easily installable, isn't as trivial to do as I had thought.

Slackware acceptable?
...
Slackware 8 is the latest/last to have i386 support, but may not play well with 8mb of ram.

https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware-8.0/

It works! Slackware 8.0 booted to a console just fine once I manually commented out reading the hardware clock to the soft clock from the RC init scripts (?). That caused a hang which I can look into later, no idea off-hand why that'd be the case although it tickles my memory.

Since it boots and seems compiled compatible with the 386SX I'm refreshing it with a full install of X on top of it. Providing that boots I'll post up a 512MB "dd" image if anyone wants to play with it.

I also had problems with a 4GB card I tried partitioned off hanging on boot on the Pocket 386. No idea if that's a LiLo limitation even with a 100MB boot partition or if there's something else I'm not remembering. Or a bad card. Although it did boot in the dev environment.

Fantastic! If you find time, please post some of the applications you've been able to install.

Congratulations.

Hi all,

I received my Pocket 386 computer from AliExpress a few days ago. It's a very nice little machine!
I like the fact that you can use the screen in a 4:3 aspect ratio; stretching it to 16:9 doesn't look like the original experience.

What do you think about a modification from the seller to make the screen's plastic bezel cover the 16:9 part, simulating a true 4:3 aspect ratio screen?
It would look much more like the Toshiba Libretto from the 90s.

Maybe the aliexpress shop could sell a plastic bezel replacement, I don't know if it would be an easy mod ?

I made a little Photoshop of what it could look like 😀