My best guess is somehow your CF card isn’t a bootable disk anymore, so it’s moving to the next device in the boot sequence.

Heh well, I think you're right! It should have been obvious to me, but I get flustered easily. Thank you for the quick response.

So here's where I'm at. After hours of poking and resetting, I seem to have found two problems.

1. I thought it had enough charge, but it wasn't booting fron any cf cards. The good one or the corrupt one.
2. Yes, it turns out one was corrupt. This was the biggest source of my confusion.

I was trying to burn dos6.22 witb HP USB Disk Image Utility. That just caused me problems. Switched to Rufus and just got Freedos running! So now I just need to get an iso for 6.22 and install 95.

Long story short, it seems HP USB Disk Image utility is no good for the Pocket 386

Hopefully my next post will be more useful. 🤡

You'll have to boot from... USB? And "sys c:"

You must likely didn't break 3.11. You just didn't know you had to choose oldmsdos from the boot f8 menu.

You did however break 95 quite convincingly.

Install 6.11,then 3.11, then 95.
You should have 6.22 in the f8 menu via the previous. Old msdos option.
Then you can run win 311.
Reboot for 95.

I had learned about the f8 option after the mistakes were made. From what I'm understanding, I can safely install 3.1 over 95 using the f8 olddos boot option. And the other issue I was having about the conflicting windows versions.. going to have to start writing stuff down.

A recent post on another forum pointed me to a program called RMPremUSB.
~10mb download and runs on Windows XP. Formatted my CF and copied MSDOS 6.22 as a bootable HDD with ease. Nice program.

With that program, I was able to revive my CF. Now I am installing 95 again. Will try the F8, olddos, install 3.11 next.

I would like to say a few words about the Pocket386. It's honestly amazing.

It comes with various languages for development including Turbo C 1 which I have used extensively for my recent projects. It was able to compile my biggest C program. (The book 8088 did it too)

I was also able to install Open Watcom. This enables you to compile for DOS, Windows, and Linux right there on your little PC. Talk about cross platform.

My next favorite thing to install on 95 is Emergence BASIC. The 2007 freeware version 1.62. Just trust me this language is epic and has stellar compatibility with windows versions. 95 to 11. My non direcrx games that draw directly to the window run fine. Even in 16 colors. The directx games don't work for the same reason Blitz Basic doesn't work right on 95. There's probably a solution, but not on the 386. More likely a 486.

There's many other tools I would like to try. Image/iconforge works I think. Great program.
Sound club "works," but you're going to need one of those fancy external sound cards. Also a great program.

Aoe2 didn't work. I know it works on 95. Just not this 95. I tried the aoe2 alpha version which is much smaller.
Vantage Master works after installing directx.
Lord Monarch works without directx.
Neophyte didn't work (probably not enough ram)

A fun game I enjoy is Quenzars Caverns. It's a vb shareware game that's fully playable with one nag. Works on 3.1 and 95 beautifully. I was even playing it with midi in the background on 95.

The midi playback is excellent. Connect the line in to a powered speaker for best sound. I used an amp and played Rammstein Engel with distortion. Sounded sick.

I would really like to listen to mod files. Looks like I'll need one of those fancy sound cards... There is a program that "works" on the book 80888 called Mod Master XT. Sounds like a swarm of bees. I thought it would work better on the 386. No. Maybe I'm doing it wrong!

While I'm at it. Anvil98 didn't run. Not enough ram I'm guessing.

Also, the keyboards. Tbey are the same as the Windows CE and android 7" netbooks. Yes, we had eee pc or toshiba libretto, but I always wanted a bootleg x86 generic pc in the same style as the CE netbooks. This is it.

Now, hopefully we will see these made with Vortex86 in the future. Long live vortex86.

I have another little pc called an ebox with 95 on it. Runs off a vortex86. That reminds me.. there's this driver I have on there that plays real audio through the pc speaker. Kinda dodgy, but cool.

I still need to get around to trying djgpp. I actually had a problem. My program compiled with djgpp wouldn't run on the pocket386. No dpmi available. The dpmi was attached to the exe and everything.

Shoot one more thing. DOOM runs slow like everyone says online... UNTIL YOUR LOWER THE DETAIL SETTING. Then boom runs smooth.

lucidapogee wrote on 2024-09-28, 09:58:

Now, hopefully we will see these made with Vortex86 in the future. Long live vortex86.

I doubt it. Those were more useful back when DM&P were producing OEM boards. The 386SX core wasn't a (useful) PC platform back then and would've been relegated to very niche applications for industrial use. I'm unsurprised there's a pile still available.

You could run the DM&P486 and Vortex86 as a reasonable computer. We used them for PXE boot and a full lightweight workstation (respectively) at the time. And the pricing was better than anything comparable.

lucidapogee wrote on 2024-09-28, 10:02:

Shoot one more thing. DOOM runs slow like everyone says online... UNTIL YOUR LOWER THE DETAIL SETTING. Then boom runs smooth.

Yeah still ultimately I'm not happy with the compromises I need to make to image quality to make it fun.

With everyone wanting Doom to be fast, youdathunk someone would have made a faster Doom... FastDoom. A new Doom port for DOS, optimized to be as fast as possible for 386/486 personal computers!

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-09-28, 20:19:

With everyone wanting Doom to be fast, youdathunk someone would have made a faster Doom... FastDoom. A new Doom port for DOS, optimized to be as fast as possible for 386/486 personal computers!

Even FastDoom can’t perform miracles. With like low detail on the HalfY renderer I can get 15fps. If you turn sound off you can get some detail back, or go full flat textures on everything but it doesn’t feel like doom.

I am convinced the RTC issues we see are not entirely hardware related, and there may be something in the BIOS that keeps resetting it. Too many times I see the RTC preseving date time correctly for weeks up to the second then mess up on a reboot and claim the year is 2001... but the time (as in, hh:mm:ss) still being set correctly to the second.

Unless the brownouts cause the RTC to corrupt the year byte first, i dunno how it could happen...

javispedro1 wrote on 2024-10-07, 09:37:

...year is 2001... but the time (as in, hh🇲🇲ss) still being set correctly to the second.

Unless the brownouts cause the RTC to corrupt the year byte first, i dunno how it could happen...

Is the month and day getting reset as well? I believe mine defaults all the date information but now that you're mentioning I can't be sure that I was paying attention. I'll have to fire it up and look.

Inhibit wrote on 2024-10-07, 12:03:

Is the month and day getting reset as well? I believe mine defaults all the date information but now that you're mentioning I can't be sure that I was paying attention. I'll have to fire it up and look.

Now that you mention it I do think the day/month are getting reset as well, but I need to also pay more attention to confirm it is changing to a specific date always. The year is for sure always reset to 2001 though.

Note that when this happens I also dont get the usual CMOS settings corrupted warning, and e.g. the setting for the floppy drive list remains correct.

Is there a 16 bit ISA extension for Pocket 386? I am searching on Aliexpress, but found 8-bit only.

rasva wrote on 2024-11-12, 19:02:

Is there a 16 bit ISA extension for Pocket 386? I am searching on Aliexpress, but found 8-bit only.

Not that I've seen. Although since the breakout's there it should work. If I had some extra edge connectors I'd be tempted to prototype one.

Inhibit wrote on 2024-11-12, 21:09:

rasva wrote on 2024-11-12, 19:02:

Is there a 16 bit ISA extension for Pocket 386? I am searching on Aliexpress, but found 8-bit only.

Not that I've seen. Although since the breakout's there it should work. If I had some extra edge connectors I'd be tempted to prototype one.

Like these? https://www.peconnectors.com/edgecards-and-ce … onics/hws15454/

Re: email and the Pocket 386. I have the last version of DOS-for-Pine working with FemtoGus, but Pine (only Alpine can) can't render a UTF-8 character set, so while the emails download rapidly, they're unreadable with the MIME/HTML issues.

Has anybody ever gotten Flmail to work? My incoming port is 110, and responding isn't important, so I'm just looking for a DOS email program that downloads coherent emails on a 110 port.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-11-12, 22:08:

Inhibit wrote on 2024-11-12, 21:09:

rasva wrote on 2024-11-12, 19:02:

Is there a 16 bit ISA extension for Pocket 386? I am searching on Aliexpress, but found 8-bit only.

Not that I've seen. Although since the breakout's there it should work. If I had some extra edge connectors I'd be tempted to prototype one.

Like these? https://www.peconnectors.com/edgecards-and-ce … onics/hws15454/

... 86 cents is in the ballpark for doing a 20 board run. I'll see if I can find the time to fire up KiCAD and make a not-incompetent one port breakout.

Woo! As long as the features don't start creeping in this should be fun.

And I finally had a few minutes to sit down and re-familiarize myself with KiCad. And thankfully find all the footprint libraries I needed.

Things to add:

• SMD spots or through-hole fuse holders for the external voltage lines
• optional diodes to make external supplied voltage card-only
• thicker traces to the external power
• external power header that isn't 2.54 pins

Any other suggestions while I'm working on it are welcome!

Are we intended to connect that with extension ribbons?