BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-05, 04:36:

Are we intended to connect that with extension ribbons?

It's got the same 2.0 pin pitch headers as the Pocket 386. A directly pinned breakout. I assume the ISA8 ribbon plus an additional ribbon will work but I'll need to check the pins orientation on everything.

I thought ribbons, because otherwise I wasn't sure how the power header was going to have room to not hit anything when you were trying to plug it to the interface. Then I am a bit suspicious of how much leverage the weight of the ISA card would apply to the pins on the P386 if it fits like that.

edit: unless the render screwed up by not representing right angle IDC pins and the ISA slot sits on the face of the board toward us, so the whole thing sits flat when plugged and the ISA is upright.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-12-05, 15:13:

I thought ribbons, because otherwise I wasn't sure how the power header was going to have room to not hit anything when you were trying to plug it to the interface. Then I am a bit suspicious of how much leverage the weight of the ISA card would apply to the pins on the P386 if it fits like that.

... it never occurred to me to just use a 90 degree female edge connector going directly to the Pocket 386 for a plug-in daughter board. That might be a better design if fiddly to create.

I'd just have to get the spacing spot-on and make a 3D printed housing that adds the depth necessary to make the whole thing flush. And measure the edge on a ISA card back-shield to see if that'd give enough space for the overhang. Though I suppose you could always hang it off a table or we could tray the whole laptop.

I'm sure for commercial users 1mm pitch cable is a standard 1000ft roll 3M part number but for a few meters on the secondary market it's pricey. Finally settled on two 30 pin ribbons to make some additional ribbon cables if necessary and fired off the connectors order.

Anyway! Simple design for now, old-school expansion tray for later!

Inhibit wrote on 2024-05-20, 15:41:

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.

Oh, hello!

Yea, at the time, I was building my own firmware based on some prototype code available. But, since then, I think WiFi support has been folded in: https://github.com/polpo/picogus/releases/tag/v2.2.0

That's the good news. The bad news? I think Ian quit making the Femto version of PicoGUS, and also PicoGUS 2.0 won't support it. If you have a Femto, you'd need a Pi Pico W as well.

But yea, if you ever have a question for me, don't be shy! I'm pretty responsive too. I just wasn't monitoring this thread over here, just happened to stumble over it.

Seeing this thing working with the pico gus is so cool. It's similar to my desktop 386 in terms of performance. I'm seriously considering buying one now. Would be neat to swap in the CF I use for my desktop 386 to use it while on the go.

Any idea what battery life is like with the isa extension and pico gus in the mix? My commute to work includes an hour long train ride. It sounds both fun and ridiculous to balance the PC, isa extension and pico gus on my lap, but I'd probably do it if the battery will last for 45 minutes.

And what does everyone think of the built in keyboard for gaming? I've read a few things here and there about keys sticking, or the keyboard otherwise having some issues that might effect quick inputs for things that may need them like arcade style games. Was wondering if this is the common theme or maybe isolated incidents.

Inhibit wrote on 2024-12-05, 04:28:

And I finally had a few minutes to sit down and re-familiarize myself with KiCad. And thankfully find all the footprint librarie […]
Show full quote

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.

Click for Mk1 ISA Breakout Image

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!

This looks awesome! It would be a huge stretch goal far beyond the scope of a simple 16-bit ISA breakout board, but I'd eventually love to see something like a "Pocket386 Dock" which connects all the back connectors of the device to a breakout box with an ISA slot + the 2 PS/2 ports, VGA, and Serial.

EriolGaurhoth wrote on 2025-01-23, 16:15:

This looks awesome! It would be a huge stretch goal far beyond the scope of a simple 16-bit ISA breakout board, but I'd eventually love to see something like a "Pocket386 Dock" which connects all the back connectors of the device to a breakout box with an ISA slot + the 2 PS/2 ports, VGA, and Serial.

Thanks! So... I did actually get a (likely) working board soldered together after a revision to compensate for a quirk in my KiCAD workflow and a flip to the hastily added edge connector. Only I realized I don't *have* any ISA-16 boards handy; I need to borrow a couple over the weekend. If it's all working I'll put up some pictures!

Ah... one other thing about this is that it's a royal pain to actually build with the parts BOM I had to use, requiring some manual sanding of the connectors to fit them. I might need some one-off connectors manufactured for that oddball number of 2mm pins. I couldn't find a good source of (acceptably cheap) 90 degree 2mm double pins in that long of a strip to do an edge connection with. Suggestions are welcome, naturally!

Honestly? Doing a full breakout tray probably isn't that much more of a pain. If I recall those pins only required connections. I was planning on carting this up in a 3D printed case anway to float it the correct distance from the table with the edge connectors I ended up designing it with stuck in.

I've yet to find the cojones to dissect/desolder the R38 but I did find this to reset date/clock automatically in WFWG as long as you're on-line. A caveat: the default time server is long-gone, so I used utcnet.colorado.edu and time will tell, so to speak.

in WFWG Startup, Tardis finds your internet connection (Femto or serial-to-wifi), adjusts date/time, then a simple Enter, Alt-F4 makes everything current.

Pretty sure the old dos tool net time will work if you want to put it in a bat

@myne If WFWG uses ndis and DOS uses MTCP, etc to get on-line, would a DOS net time stay persistent once WFGW loaded?

All net time does is update the Rtc.
I don't see why not, but I was thinking more along the lines of a login script.

Use pool.ntp.org -- info at https://www.ntppool.org/en/use.html

I've been looking into the Pocket386 since late January and there are a lot of weird things going on with the SoC, perhaps the board, I can't be sure. since the Hand386 also uses this chipset, there may be some overlap to these issues?

Setting SYSCLK/ATCLK to anything but 7.159 MHz will cause instability and crashes. The M6117D documentation says this is a limitation of the 82C54, and to see "Appendix C" - which doesn't exist in the documentation at all. Maybe it was a separate sheet, or was mistakenly omitted, but I'm in the dark on what is going on there. Allegedly (heh) you can overclock the ISA bus in your custom programs to get around these issues. I asked around to my nerd friends, and one brought up the idea that the 40 MHz CPU clock may be the culprit; setting the CPU to a lower clock speed may fix the timing issues, but not sure how to do that in software, at all.

The keyboard seems to be polling wrong, or too fast. Keys can "stick" and there is little to no rollover, or when there is, keys start "sticking". This is a huge problem!

Adlib Tracker 2 would be a wonderful program for this system and may redeem it, but it crashes on checking the memory. I bought this system for a portable OPL3 player, so this is a huge blow to my spirits. Perhaps there's a way to fix this, but I'm in the dark on what's going on. Forcing text mode in the ini files also don't fix it - barf!

UniVBE is off the table completely. At least for the Cirrus Logic VGA chipset Pocket386s, trying to start it causes the screen to blank and power usage to skyrocket on the VGA card - sometimes causing the battery low warning to show up even when plugged into the wall.

Sneakernets wrote on 2025-02-06, 19:09:

The M6117D documentation says this is a limitation of the 82C54, and to see "Appendix C" - which doesn't exist in the documentation at all.

You may have some luck trolling through Archive.org's wayback machine for dmp.com.tw or for some M6117C ALi/nVidia documents.

I didn't have immediately see something with some initial searches but here's a link to where I started. It does look like there's documentation there that probably isn't reproduced. https://web.archive.org/web/20031014101545/ht … mp.com.tw/tech/

Sneakernets wrote on 2025-02-06, 19:09:

The keyboard seems to be polling wrong, or too fast. Keys can "stick" and there is little to no rollover, or when there is, keys start "sticking". This is a huge problem!

Adlib Tracker 2 would be a wonderful program for this system and may redeem it, but it crashes on checking the memory. I bought this system for a portable OPL3 player, so this is a huge blow to my spirits. Perhaps there's a way to fix this, but I'm in the dark on what's going on. Forcing text mode in the ini files also don't fix it - barf!

I've heard a bit about these keyboard issues. Over here, someone does a comparison of the internal keyboard vs an external keyboard for registering inputs, with the finding that the internal keyboard is very much noticeably slower. https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/poc … .1247640/page-9
I've also heard about the sticking keys issue from a guy on FB when he was playing a particular game. On the other hand, I've also seen videos of people casually playing stuff like Wolfenstein, Jazz Jackrabbit, Doom etc. with the internal keyboard and seemingly not having that much of an issue. I have one of these in the mail to me right now so I'll have to check it out for myself to see how discouraging it is for portable dos gaming (the main reason I've bought one). I heard there is a keyboard jamming testing program that came with Star Control 1, maybe that could be a good utility to evaluate the keyboard and see if there are certain things like particular key combinations that are more likely to produce the key sticking issues.

I am planning on using mine with a picogus, which provides opl3 emulation as well. I can test out adlib tracker on mine with the internal sound and the picogus when it comes in to see if I have the same issues you do. From following posts about this machine over time, it seems like the creator sometimes makes adjustments to the product (e.g., removing a component from the motherboard that was causing RTC issues on earlier versions of the machine, changing the contents of the included CF card from Win 95 over to Dos 6.22 and Win 3.1 due to complaints about Win 95 performance, using different video card chips). That's a long way of saying, perhaps different machines will react slightly differently on a few of these issues. I'll be happy to test and compare notes with mine.

Yeah, I have a Win3.11 version, that seems to be what they're shipping with now - both my Clear and Black models shipped with that. I wish there was more communication from them on this kind of stuff.

Sneakernets wrote on 2025-02-06, 23:51:

I wish there was more communication from them on this kind of stuff.

I'd be happier if they released the set-up firmwares and on-hardware software they're shipping out. From looking at the website and talking with folks there seems to be some confusion about how second hand original parts work, in that the part retains rights to whatever was installed on it if it's re-used. Generally.

I can't recall the exact instance but I remember a blanked copyright notice for a firmware in there somewhere, where it was the integrated firmware on an original part. Might be the video.

The confusion of ideas that'd lead you to do that and pre-install Win 3.11 boggles my mind.

There appears to be a new laptop product from these guys - no its not a pocket 486 or pentium... its an MSX laptop https://www.tindie.com/products/cycle/msxbook … -msx2-computer/

I see it in several other places as well, like ebay accounts that are selling the pocket 386 just added this item for sale too.

Very nice find. Worth exploring.

dukeofurl wrote on 2025-02-11, 02:00:

There appears to be a new laptop product from these guys - no its not a pocket 486 or pentium... its an MSX laptop https://www.tindie.com/products/cycle/msxbook … -msx2-computer/

I can't decide if that's an expensive Z80 or a very cheap MSX2. Weird mash-up with the FPGA there and it doesn't look like there's much like it available.

Thanks for pointing it out!