Unfortunately that's a step up. The 386 embedded chip they are using is all in one, with an easy to slap on isa bus (and a few free gpio ports separate from the printer). When the 486 came around you have to start using BGA chips and from the Book 8088 and what I have seen on this unit I suspect the people building them don't have that ablity. Something like the Elan SC410 is an amd 486 WITH both a isa bus AND a VL local bus. That said I don't expect much on that end. I hope this product does well enough for them to think about it.
@@warlockd I think there's an SC410 that goes all the way up to 100MHz. If they wanted to max out a hypothetical 486 like they seem to do here with the 386 all the way at 40MHz, would be one amazing machine. But also likely a lot more expensive to source those SOCs and thus a significantly more expensive product than the $200ish they're charging for the 386 variant.
Thanks for posting this review! I wasn't aware this was a thing before, but it's pretty cool that it is. Kinda crazy that so many of these components are still just off-the-shelf parts, especially the Yamaha OPL3 chip. And I agree, I'd love to see a 486 or even a pentium variant in the future!
Indeed, and this kind of configuration in the late 80s/early 90s was very expensive 5-6000+$ (+-12-15000 in today's money), it was a dream laptop in these days : 386-SX40, 8MB, 4GB, VGA, color monitor, sound card, 4h+ battery, ... in less than 500g. My father bought a Toshiba T3100e in 1988, 80286-12, 2MB, 40MB, CGA 640x200/400 B&W orange, 720Ko DD(upgraded to 1.44) + Internal modem (no battery, no sound card, no color display, 8Kg ...) , I still have the original invoice, it was in francs as I'm Belgian but converted it's +- 6500$ (+-15K today). Not a bad buy as I still use it today.
A high end 486 (DX2 66 and up) would absolutely kill. An actual built-in-to-the-case serial & gameport jack would be a must however. Would make a great midi brain for some of us external module nuts. DX2 66 was the last 486 not requiring a thick heatsink/fan combo. This is the problem going forward in this form factor. But if possible, an AMD 133 would be incredible. Some linksys routers basically had an embedded 486/586 SOC in them with very little or no cooling. So there is hope yet.
Fantastic video on this system! If they released the Pocket 486, here's what I would want it to have: 486 DX-2 66 Mhz CPU 16 MB RAM (I'd prefer 20 to have some breathing room) Windows 3.1 cuz some childhood games of mine are 3.1 compliant. And as such, it will meet the minimum requirements far as CPU and RAM is concerned. And yes, I would rather use it as a Windows 3.1 machine since I've never owned a Windows 3.1 PC in all my life haha😆
This is the machine I wish I could have had in college with which to play Doom. I remember playing the Shareware version on someone's monochrome 386 laptop running Win3.1 & DOS.
thank you for the in depth review...I saw some videos on the book8088 and they scared me...this has a bit more power, for me as a software developer it's where the machine got really useful but didn't jump the shark with 6 ways to do the same thing. Going to be getting one and start diving back into old tools I used to use back in the day...
The trick would be to put a raspberry pi pico on the usb as your drive and then download to that drive from a windows box on the network and then access the files from the procket 386.
This was so awesome! So much fun to watch! I love that people are making modern tech made to play old games. I still have all my windows 98 timeframe games and I like to play them (some I’m saving for the kids to play when they get older) and this makes me really happy! Haha. Also love how you describe what you’re doing as you’re doing it! I need step by steps! Hehe.
I bought a GPD Win Mini recently and I thought to myself, man, wouldn't it be cool if I had something in this form factor for DOS/9x. I remembered about the Japanese PC110 that came close, and could even be used as a phone, and lamented the fact that it didn't come to the west, or saw any successors. Hopefully someone ends up making a Pentium MMX version (or K6-2+/3+) that can be slowed down to 486/386 speeds. Even better, if they somehow manage to recreate a docking interface a la IBM Selectadock for added expansion cards, now THAT I'd buy in a heartbeat.
Love it... I had a bla k sharp slc 50 mhz system with all of 256kb memory and 20mb of hard disk space with win 3.1 which booted Dos. Damn I miss it. Used to run meade starfinder on display with a control port for my 3 meter dish.. never failed and ran for over 20 years
Probably a basic question but can you tell me how you set up the flash drive with games so the directory would come up with them? I'm not doing it right.
I also still have my first proper hardcore gaming rig which was a Pentium 3 I think that had both a 16 MB Riva TNT 2 as well as a 12 MB voodoo 2 3D accelerator. Still think it's crazy how far we've come in PC gaming parts.
I've got a very old Dell Latitude LS400 from around the Millennium..works fine..cost me some 25 British Pounds (around 35 dollars ) in spare non working LS to replace broken parts..installing Windows 98se was a bit of a struggle..aren't all retro devices if you don't have driver disks and accessories..got the touchpad to work fine and external PS/2 mouse..i prefer the mouse control..no annoying missing .dll or missing entry points etc notifications finally..that Laptop on the video..limit for games is about Prince of Persia..even pinball might be a push for it
I was about to order one of these when I found this video. The one I'm getting has a clear case instead of the transparent black. I still have most of the DOS games and applications that I ran back in the day so this will be fun. I have Windows 3.11 in case this thing is too slow for 95. I think I still have an AOL install disk somewhere too, not that it will do anything since AOL is gone, Lol. I'll have to come up with an adapter to accept an external floppy disk drive just for fun. BTW, the parallel port is useful for plugging in an old school dot matrix printer, in case one has one laying around. Not sure why I'm buying one of these because I still have my 386 powered laptop, along with a 286 and 486 laptop.
I actually want one just to relive my childhood. Windows 95 is actually older then me but i had a windows 95 computer handed down to me from a family member. My parents unfortunately threw it out once they got a windows xp computer. I should have told my parents to save it but i was just a child back then i miss it alot know.
Is it bad that I still have a fully working 486 system in my back room? I wanted to keep it around if I had room just in case my kids were ever curious about early PC gaming back in the dos days
Hi. Nice video. What size is your USB drive ? I've tried with one 2GB USB drive formatted as FAT16 but my Pocket386 does not seem to be able to mount it. With what utility have you formatted yours ? Does it matter if the partition type is guided or it has MBR ?
Mike is just an 8GB old geek squad drive from Best Buy. I didn’t specially format it at all. I think mine is FAT32. I’ve heard some usb drives just don’t work with it for some reason. Of course, you do have to reboot the machine every time you plug in another usb. But you probably already just knew that.
@@retrotv1tech Thanks. I managed to make mine to work by disabling the floppy from BIOS that enabled for some reason. Another question, can you xcopy files from the CF drive to the usb stick ? I can do it the other way around, but if I try to write anything on the USB drive I get a write error.
Looks like he’s using a much better screen than the garbage one that came in the Book8088. Wish I’d never bought that one, but this looks a lot more interesting
Your video influenced me into buying one of these Pocket 386 PCs. Having fun playing around with it so far, but I'm not having any luck getting the built-in mouse to work. I tried enabling/disabling PS2 mouse in BIOS, toggled internal mouse on/off with FN+5, and checked it with Fn+F5. Nothing I do seems to get the mouse to move using the arrow keys... Do you have any suggestions???
Heh. They’re just using standard Half-Life key mappings… WASD+mlook for movement and E for actions. If I got one of these I’d likely keep them unchanged, I have too much muscle memory from playing Quake and HL/HL 2/Portal/Portal 2 to be able to use classic mappings at this point. Also, my very first PC also rocked a 40 MHz 386SX, but it didn’t have a sound card and had a paltry amount of memory… I’d love to have one of these just for nostalgia’s sake and for loading some of my old games. Sure, I can run them in Boxer/DOSBox on my Mac but it’s not the same as doing so on actual hardware.
This is a super helpful review. I own the Book8088 and it's nice to know that the display is much more improved! Not sure why a socketed 386dx wasn't implemented instead of the 386sx though ? The volume controls are on the board and it appears that in order to make the case design sleak and simple the volume controls and ports are all provided on cables. I'm not a fan of those cable dongles as these things can easilly get misplaced or lost :[
That is very true… and it is a pain removing a panel to adjust the volume. I’m surprised this couldn’t have been implemented as part of the pop-up menus since you can turn the sound off and on this way.
@@retrotv1tech I guess an updated BIOS could add a pop-up volume control but it looks like the volume control is analog and not digital if controlled by the pots.
Hi Josh...Mine is shutting down after a few minutes when it is in Windows 95. When I leave it in DOS it does not do this. Any ideas what may be going on?
I'd love to know how to connect a floppy drive to this, I tried via USB (both FDD and CD-ROM), but that didn't work. The BIOS says that Floppy Disk is Enabled. Any ideas, besides adding another ISA card and connecting the drives that way? Thanks for these videos, they are excellent
You just need to get a compact flash to usb adapter on Amazon. Then, plug it into any modern computer, download the file, and transfer it to the compact flash card through the usb adapter. The usb compact flash adapter makes the compact flash card act like a normal drive on the modern computer.
Windows System Sounds can be fixed by installing an OPL3 Windows 3.1 wav driver. I found one readily available on the web. My main squipe is the time and date are so screwey, like there's a disconnection with the bios, Windows, and DOS clocks. Y2K bug for real!
Since this has the 16-bit ISA in the back, I wonder how well you could make an adapter for one of those SBC ISA Backplanes and then just start sticking in ISA cards? ISA is a shared bus, so it should in theory just work. And, that could give you access to some PCI devices if Windows 95 can handles them. PCI is backwards compatible with ISA with the right chips, and I think the right ISA/PCI SBC Backplane will have that built in.
I do not see why an external ISA backplane wouldn't work. Emulating PCI over ISA is more troublesome, for example PCI DMA is fundamentally different from ISA DMA. This could only work for a few select examples and I do not know if there exist any chips for this.. PCI-to-ISA-bridges exist, but they need extra signals from the chipset that are not available in a normal PCI slot.
Can it run a Covox Speech thing in place of an Adlib OPL3 externally? I don't see why not, but it would be good to test it out. I'm thinking that either an ISA card would suffice for a classic Sound Blaster 8 bit card, or you could really go all-out and put a riser card atop the system to extend the bus to a full system literally. The question is whether it will support that or not, and whether it is able to properly handle DMA requests, or if it is hard-coded to only just use one slot and a pre-configured. Also, does DPMI access all 8mb in protected mode for any program? Or do you have to have other DOS extenders that are proprietary in nature and might/might not work based upon it? Dos32 should be the the usual, but I'm wondering if programming in Turbo Pascal, Assembly Language, or C has any hangups or gotchas that I have to worry about beyond just using Dos games? It should be fine with general Dos games and maybe Nesticle as far as emulators, but I am concerned about whether or not I will have full control as a programmer. Can I use existing programs that I have written and expect them to run like before, or will I have to rewrite it and change it accordingly?
Have you gotten any nano usb drive to run? Given the form factor, I'd like a store-n-go drive (Cruzer, Verbatim) to physically stay out of the way, but none will get past boot.
I had 386DX/40 with 4MB RAM and to my memory it ran Doom and Doom2 just fine. I guess it's due to 386SX instead of DX version. Also those games (Wolfenstein, Doom) ran in 320x200, not 640x480.
This would be useful for experiments with X86 assembly language and parallel port and other legacy hardware projects. Also learning about MINIX using Tanenbaum's book operating systems: design and implementation as well as QBASIC programming. I'll be waiting for a 486/Pentuim version.
This is what I complained about since they came out with the originals, why put the 386 in the portable device? it's unuseable, just put that in the laptop and we'll all be happy
The price is right. I used a 386 at work in the Windows 3.1 days. It was better than the 286, but I was mostly unimpressed. I'd be excited if they would make a 486 version of this.
I watched this video again and I cant help but see that some of the colors in those games do not look correct. Some of the reds/magentas look like a purple/pink color. The video capture output looks much better though.
Definitely not the same thing, but a great way to remember this era in a small package for people who don't have room for a full size retro desktop PC with disk drives.
Having had a low end 486 when Windows 95 first came out, I can before you even begin testing it that a 386SX is going to be dog slow in that OS. Yeah, it will be fine for DOS and probably would have been OK for Windows 3.1, but 95 will NOT be good. If it had been a 386DX, at least it would have had a fighting chance. A 486SX is the bare minimum for a decent experience in Windows 95.
I got mine today...mine came with dos 6.22 and windows 3.11...not windows 95...the doc talks about ghost.exe and pocketpc.gho as a drive image you can load on another machine and flash the compact flash so you can restart a dead machine...machine isn't dead yea...but would like the windows 95 load for this without a hunt for drivers, etc. going to see if I cnd find ghost.exe so I can image what i have...I am sure it's just common dos style imaging software. Let me know if anyone has this stuff.
Dang, they put the USB port in upside down ☹️ For anyone that says it doesn't matter, it actually does. With the port upside down, it's gonna collect more dust on the connections..
Has anyone an idea as to how to get this to have access to a real floppy drive? That would be sooo cool to install Linux on this. 8-bit ISA controllers for floppy seem to be quite rare while 16-bit cards are widely available, do they still work?
@@retrotv1tech the chip they used should be an intergated one which offer system bus and south bridge function besides cpu, but the speed is awful if lack FPU...it would be great if come with a Pentium MMX based platform
We REALLY need this with the hardware 16650 serial 9 pin port(s). The Motorola and Kenwood Two-way Radios need a hardware 16 bit hardware serial port that responds exactly like the old serial ports because a USB to Serial does not work with the software. DOS real DOS is needed as well.
The GPIO port is connected to the internal ISA slot, which can be used as an external port for the addin card, for example if you put a serial port card into the slot , the GPIO can be convert into COM1 for your dos system, I use it to connect to an ESP8266 to get on internet.
and the community around PicoGUS (and FemtoGUS), and PicoMEM is trying to come up with a "PicoPocket" that puts a Pico on that internal card slot and exposes its outputs to the GPIO port.
I will never understand anyone using their screen stretched. It's fuzzy and looks incorrect and honestly just cheeses me off. It's a polarizing opinion to me.
1) You are very behind as these have been reported on by a few channels and is at least a year old by now. 2) Windows 95?! 386 computers are not powerful enough for Windows 95. Stick to Windows 3.1 on them. You need at least a 486 for 95. (Not saying you personally suggest Windows 95 on it, just it's a bad idea, too slow)
Nope. This one came out in April. The hand 386 was last year. Totally different form factor. The laptop version was an 8088 processor and called the book 8088.
Non 4:3 screen and huge bezels, hard pass, better pick a cheapo laptop with 3:2 or even 16:10 screen. Even considering the annoyance of using PCem or even DOSBox quirks, this piece of hardware is not going to be any less quirky due to the lack of support and documentation.
I don’t think bezel size is a consideration for most people finding a retro system. 😂 have you seen bezels on retro laptops? Also, as I said, the screen actually runs in 4:3 at 640x480, which makes it better than most retro laptops that usually had 800x600 or 1024x768 screens that had horrible scaling. Also, 16:10 is not going to be a noticeable difference over 16:9 at this size.
