VOGONS


First post, by fronzel

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Well so i got this old Japanese plamtop running a cut-down MS-DOS 3.10 (Japanese version). I say "cut down" because it lacks all the external tools that came with MS-DOS 3.1...

I tried running some appz and games but i usually just crash DOS. Not sure if the display/GFX card is 100% CGA compatible... I'd estimate it a monochrome CGA but not much info on the web regarding this machine (Fujitsu OASYS POCKET 3).

Does anyone know any appz, games, tools that work on MS-DOS 3.10? Trying to get some fun out of this machine. Some sysinfo tool from stone age would be cool since i don't even know how much RAM this machine got.

Thanks in advance for any answer. 😊

Reply 1 of 5, by Jorpho

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There are probably more limitations inherent in the hardware (such as the limited RAM or graphics) than there are in MS-DOS 3.1. (If you booted MS-DOS 3.1 in DOSBox, I suspect you'd find that it would still run many of these programs that are crashing the computer.) I rather doubt there is much fun to be had. I would suggest text-only games, but it's not an 80-column display, is it?

An old version of Norton Utilities will probably work, if you can track one down.

Reply 2 of 5, by lolo799

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Some sysinfo tool that may work: nssi, sys44, sysid
http://www.navsoft.cz/products.htm
http://ftp.freenet.de/pub/ftp.simtel.net/pub/ … info/sys_44.zip
http://ftp.freenet.de/pub/ftp.simtel.net/pub/ … fo/sysid602.zip
And for games Prince of Persia and the CGA version of Stunt Car Racer, all of those work on the HP 200LX so maybe they do on this machine as well.

PCMCIA Sound, Storage & Graphics

Reply 3 of 5, by idspispopd

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Best page I could find on the machine: http://www1.hinocatv.ne.jp/toshiki/computer/o … what_pk3-e.html
(Engrish, but readable)
Mentions DOS mode for graphics.

Last edited by idspispopd on 2015-03-16, 14:33. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 4 of 5, by fronzel

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Thanks for the replies everyone!

Finally had some more time to fumble around with it today. Well at least a few minutes.

The machine is a real oddball if you compare it to other DOS based palmtops like "Poqet PC", "HP 200LX", "Sharp PC-3000", etc. At first it was extremely late as it came out in 1994. So you would expect DOS 5 or 6, but not MS-DOS 3.10. I guess the Japanese DOS 3.10 was kinda special since it displays all messages in "proper" Japanese, meaning it uses the complicated Kanji characters, not just Katakana and Hiragana (these are a bit easier to read for me, my Japanese is not that great).

And also it has a quite custom Japanese keyboard, so no real alt, ctrl and other keys, which makes it a bit hard.

I managed to get 3 appz from that ftp running, so I know it has an 80286 processor which was a surprise since other plamtops rather have a 8086 clone CPU. Also it accepts a 4MB SRAM card which some other palmtops with later DOS versions rejected. I also tried Flash cards, but no luck. But i believe with the appropriate driver it might be possible.

I think the reason that most appz crash is the weird Japanese GUI that starts up first, so DOS is only used as a "shell". But since i can edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys I think i can get rid of that. Also i can install a driver for Flash cards that way.

I believe it has at least 1MB RAM since i have like 500KB free memory and some drives mapped which seem to be kinda RAM disk. So maybe possible to use some EMS as well. I don't expect wonders, but i enjoy understanding and getting most out of such neat old machines.