I have read through this entire thread and, I have to admit, I am not sure if this device is worth having or not. Seems there's quite a few issues with it. Are people, in general, happy with the purchase?

I have Pocket 8086 and I am very happy with that. I bought it to try out old XT-class games and to learn 8086/8088 Assembly language on.

I don't have a 386 in my collection. Though, I am building a pseudo 386 out of a Pentium MMX at 100Mhz with cache disabled, and ISA video card, and EDO RAM, with SB Pro 2.0.

I was considering the Pocket 386, as potentially useful for running games that won't run on my Pocket 8088 or Pseudo 386. But, that's theoretical though, as I haven't found any games that I can't run yet. Lol.

RetroPCCupboard wrote on 2025-07-11, 06:43:

Are people, in general, happy with the purchase?

As a gaming device, I have a ton of issues mainly related to its size. I was aware this would be an issue before I purchased. If I was going to use it for an extended gaming session, I would defiantly hook external mouse, external keyboard, and use an external monitor. Stuff like the RTC not working reliably doesn’t bother me at all, sometimes it loses the bios settings which is annoying. A 386 class machine wasn’t necessarily something I was nostalgic for, I would have preferred a fast 486 or slow pentium.

I find it to be a convenient device for me to test things on mainly due to the integrated usb storage support- I can do some programming in dosbox on my laptop and then transfer my work to usb and instantly test on the Pocket386 right next to my laptop.

So it’s not perfect, but I like having a portable dos machine for testing.

BinaryDemon wrote on 2025-07-11, 11:15:

As a gaming device, I have a ton of issues mainly related to its size. I was aware this would be an issue before I purchased. If I was going to use it for an extended gaming session, I would defiantly hook external mouse, external keyboard, and use an external monitor. Stuff like the RTC not working reliably doesn’t bother me at all, sometimes it loses the bios settings which is annoying. A 386 class machine wasn’t necessarily something I was nostalgic for, I would have preferred a fast 486 or slow pentium.

I find it to be a convenient device for me to test things on mainly due to the integrated usb storage support- I can do some programming in dosbox on my laptop and then transfer my work to usb and instantly test on the Pocket386 right next to my laptop.

So it’s not perfect, but I like having a portable dos machine for testing.

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I wasn't planning to game with the built-in keyboard / mouse functionality. I have a PS/2 & VGA KVM. So I would just connect the device to one of the KVM ports.