VOGONS


First post, by incanus

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I have a Dolch-esque 386-LCD clone that I'm attempting to resurrect over in this post. At this point, I'm pretty much down to the guess that some of the motherboard traces have been damaged by the battery leak. I'm going to attempt to repair them (I think?) but assuming that goes badly or doesn't work...

I'd love to replace the guts of this thing that pretty easily allows me to use the internal LCD, which has a special ISA video card with the Cirrus Logic GD610/620 chipset. Space is a concern, since this is a luggable, so I need something no bigger than the 330x220mm current DFI-386SX board.

While I'm doing this, I'd love to stay pretty period-accurate. My original intention was to really gut this thing, but I've since fallen in love with the era of hardware and some memories from back in the day and thus would like to start by keeping the LCD, thus the ISA card, this a vintage board & CPU.

Ideas?

Reply 1 of 3, by pentiumspeed

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Experience:

These clone luggables use oddball video card LCD controller that drives LCD is always specific to LCD panel. Keep it paired and keyboard also are made to fit together with their luggable chassis if you have missing one, use a AT or PS/2 with adapter keyboard anyway.

Also I had issues trying to use different motherboard (286 changed to motherboard 386 or 486, didn't remember, was couple of decades), that crashes on a LCD and also had another exactly like this except with plasma panel luggable once that worked great but panel was blurry (old age?). Good plasma panel is hard to come by and I did saw plasma panel back in the day when they were newer were very sharp and crisp, that includes IBM PS/2 P70 back in the day. I was working at university computing dept service so I get to see all the goodies, L40SX too, that you see all the time in the wishbooks.

When I got one many years later, aged P70 was blurry and panel pixels little noisy.

The clone luggable chassis (all plastic especially) will be broken as well, spring mounts snapped off, motherboard's mounts all plastic so need to use plastic short screws, and funny drive mount cages fussy to work with. Happened to both I had.

Cheers,

Great Northern aka Canada.

Reply 2 of 3, by incanus

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That's helpful, thanks. I'm thinking of trying a 386 motherboard just to see how this video card and LCD perform, but figured I might try to make an informed purchase of one I could possibly fit in the case if everything ended up working ok (haha).