VOGONS


First post, by CornBrown

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This is my latest build Mostly for playing MIDI files at little parties:

Dolch luggable portable PC (PAC)
removed original pentium 100mhz board
added:
PC CHIPS M571 Motherboard (new old stock)
AMD K6-II 500mhz afx (underclocked to 400mhz to keep it cooler)
4 x 32mb (128mb ) 72 pin simms (because of the space limitations, i couldn't fit any pc100 ram in there, unfortunately)
Yamaha SW1000XG sound card
Mach64 pci graphics
NEC PCI usb 2.0 card
IDE to CF w/ 16gb card for the win98 installation
COMBO usb card reader/floppy drive! 😀

will cleanup the cables eventually.

Notice how close the cpu fan is to the floppy/LCD controller bracket 😜 Luckily, it doesn't touch!

Last edited by CornBrown on 2017-11-26, 07:20. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 6, by CornBrown

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more

Reply 2 of 6, by jheronimus

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Awesome! I've been thinking of buying a Dolch myself, but I am concerned about the weird VGA card. I notice that you came up with some sort of solution to use a regular Mach64 — can you tell a bit more about it?

MR BIOS catalog
Unicore catalog

Reply 3 of 6, by CornBrown

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The board with the xilinx chip on it is an lcd controller, it came w/ the dolch. Ive not seen any other models with it but i believe it was an option so there might be more out there. For my application a 640x480 lcd was fine, but if it didn't have the controller board i probably would've just bought a 10in lcd off ebay or amazon and installed that instead. That's the plan if this one ever dies

Reply 4 of 6, by xjas

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Nice, I've been after one of those for a while, but between numbskulls destroying them because "OMG IT HAZ TEH CLICKY KEYBOARD" and industrial sellers on Ebay asking $800+ in the pained hopes that someone out there needs one for some dumb mission-critical business task, they've just vanished off the open market.

What's weird about the VGA card? I just assumed it would have the little pinheader for an industrial-style LCD - I have a couple ordinary desktop cards here with that.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 5 of 6, by CornBrown

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There's nothing weird about the Mach64 pci vga card, it's just putting out vga to the cable that goes into the lcd controller.

I think a lot of the dolchs have a pci or isa video card with the lcd controller built in which is pretty limiting.

I got this one pretty cheap and in near-immaculate condition. It must have been in a lab, or the inside was dusted heavily- it was the cleanest computer i've ever opened, even the fans were like-new.

The seller initially wanted 7-800 for it but after being online for like 2-3 mos they dropped it significantly. Then, they took my best offer with free shipping. 😀

If you're looking for one you might adjust your search to be more broad or to include a few other brands (their names escape me rn). Apparently there were several companies that re-branded these PCs for different portable purposes.