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Pocket 386

a new Vortex86 would definitely be on my radar, but they are way too expensive, just the SBC is easy 2x the price of this whole how to call it "laptop" I own as well a well preserved 486 DX Compaq laptop, but prefer to keep it off, its Vintage now. So this Chinese variant should work for me, I ordered the transparent cover, when it arrives I can share pictures of the soldering and pcb works
 
The motherboards are new so no leaky caps I assume. Most of the time it's the board that goes bad from capacitor rot or backup battery leaking.
 
Well if it had real serial ports I could use it to replace my Toshiba 660CDT as the system I use to troubleshoot my 30 year old GM Factory Electric truck. The Magnecharger interface is pretty old code and runs best on Windows 95 native....
 
Something tells me the people making / buying this don't have a desire to have real serial ports. But maybe if you want to use the idc connector with a breakout that's a bit awkward for a little hand held, maybe it can be done? If there aren't integration bugs in the quickly designed motherboards.
 
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Laptops had bad build quality until maybe the early Pentium era (same time most had TFT screens). Serial and Parallel ports lived on in laptops long after they got ditched on desktops.

My diagnostic tester for my 20+ year old car is Bluetooth, I think. ECM on my 82 corvette is by the battery in the back seat no idea how that works.
 
Unknown_K said:
The motherboards are new so no leaky caps I assume. Most of the time it's the board that goes bad from capacitor rot or backup battery leaking.
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There's so much more to "quality" than leaky caps. The previous "Hand386" (which was based on exactly the same SoC) had a pretty lousy reputation for just randomly dropping dead, and as evidenced by the Book 8088 threads here and on other forums that system also has massively inconsistent build quality.

On one hand I don't want to be *too* mean about these things, they're cheap, and obviously designed and built towards "toy level" build and quality standards (which makes it kind of unfair to set anything but the lowest possible expectations for them). They're frankly a pretty clever use for these industrial leftovers, and you could also argue that the exact combination of features on offer here (extremely small size/portability *plus* a color screen) aren't things you could realistically find in an actual 386sx laptop. (There was an NEC Prospeed model from 1989 that's usually cited as the first ever color LCD equipped consumer laptop, but color, let alone color that didn't look just awful, wasn't even remotely common until nearly the mid-1990's, IE, late 486/early Pentium laptop era.) But, come on, let's be serious here: making a "reliability" case for these seems pretty darn absurd. These are extremely cheap (by every measure) and the shoddy engineering and construction is firmly on display. I mean, I guess flipping back to the other side, most 30 year old laptops are garbage at this point because of various age-related failures, but I don't think any sane person could argue that their initial quality was even remotely in the same ballpark as these pocket 386s.

So... shrug. Pin me to the wall and, yes, I'll agree the Pocket 386 is more likely to work *now* than any random 486 laptop snagged off of eBay, but I would also wager that it's going to age much, much less gracefully, or at least it would if you tried to actually use it in a daily capacity like the originals were designed for.
 
If they realized the thing as a PC case and not a laptop, it would be more profitable to them and to the community.
I don't think they'll sell out these as fast as they did with Book8088 and Hand386, after all most of those were bought by reviewers.

The 386 guts might be best ever but you're still getting a crap laptop, crap keyboard, crap assembly, shoddy LCD. It is way more easier to realize a small form factor PC with 2 inner ISA slots, in the format and size of a thin client, and make it decent as far as construction and finish goes, than a full blown laptop enclosure. 386 PCs on the other hand are not cheap and boards are not cheap, as they were suspect to damage over years.

I would be tempted to give $300 for a new 386 PC, laptop, thanks but no.
 
For those looking for a different form factor, have you considered taking the PCBs out of a Hand386 or Pocket386 and re-homing them? It’d be a seriously easy job, to knock up a new chassis, if you want an SFF PC, and the original ports are already available, including ISA, serial, parallel, PS/2 and VGA.

Plus, you don’t need to hack up vintage gear. At the price the seller is asking, it’s pretty hard to complain. How many other fully-working 386sx portables can you find for $300? And, given manufacturing cost, I don’t really think these things could be much cheaper.

Quality is certainly iffy, and if you compare to any of my vintage Toshiba or Zenith portables, these come up far short. But, they are available in quantity and _vastly_ cheaper than any of these were sold for.

So, IMO, buy or don’t, as you feel appropriate, but the seller seems to have demonstrated pretty good customer service for those whose machines have died or not worked properly, even if they don’t seem to find it necessary to comply with licenses or to “borrow” @sergey and others’ work.

- Alex
 
yes rebuilding it to another case is something I play with in my mind, want a mechanical keyboard, OLED screen, adding a floppy and ports, change the battery to bigger and pass trough charging, if there would be space reducion to a full 16bis ISA for a true sound card, would be a dream :D
 
Also why does the screen shot show windows 95 if its a 386SX? That would be ungodly slow. Its misleading and rather stupid.

I mean I ran windows 94 on my Compaq 486 33mhz laptop and THAT was a lesson in patience.
 
ajacocks said:
For those looking for a different form factor, have you considered taking the PCBs out of a Hand386 or Pocket386 and re-homing them? It’d be a seriously easy job, to knock up a new chassis, if you want an SFF PC, and the original ports are already available, including ISA, serial, parallel, PS/2 and VGA.
Click to expand...

ISA's a brain-damaged 8-bit subset of it, but I suppose that's neither here nor there.

If you dig around AliExpress and the other usual suspects you can find mostly dead listings for what I strongly suspect is the source of the SoCs for these systems, a SBC in the form factor of a mid-length 16 bit ISA card that also has the PC/104 stacking connectors on it, allowing the board to be used either in a PC/104-style sandwich or slotted into a passive backplane. If what you really want is a "more modern" desktop 386sx one of those would probably be a smarter bet than trying to repackage one of these things. And once you've crossed that rubicon you need to start weighing whether the fact that this lashup would still technically be about half as old as the various small 386 and 486 baby AT boards you can buy on eBay for less than half the price of one of those PC/104 boards plus a passive backplane...

I guess if a marginally fast enough for DOS games PC is really what you want then, sure, go for it, but... a thing that's worth considering is software like this exists now, which lets you set up certain notebooks and thin clients that cost practically as pure DOS machines with legacy Soundblaster emulation. If what you want is portable DOS games a setup like that is going to be far more performant.
 
Main point of pocket386 is not because it's cheap for more than it worth. For me Book 8088 v2 and Pocket386 are the only books, representing experience from 80s and 90s I want to use in 2024, cause they are small and have color active screen first! Oldest books worth to use in my collection are HP Omnibook 600CT and Compaq LTE Elite 475CXL and it's not because I don't have anything older, but because it's funny and near impossible to use the others without extra hassle, like external monitor and power adapter or even keyboard!
We are talking here about LAPTOPS, isn't it? Or you guys here use retro laptops as portables? That's another issue with old laptops. All my XT laptops luckily have working batteries in it. I made it work. some other younger laptops don't have batteries and that's bothering me a lot, cause they are converting to a museum item...portables... like I can't find battery for PowerBook G3 PDQ/Wallstreet - very sad. Cell sizes are not standard!!!
Ok, moreover. I own 4 XT laptops... No matter how I love Tandy 1400lt, Toshiba T1100 plus and Zenith Data 183, 191? (Don't remember, the biggest dude!) - pre active color matrix screen suck a lot. Playing games? sure, in mono with inverted....I would say perverted palette LOL.... Tandy 1400 LT has small utility which swap the color palette, but than it's wide screen.... Bleh... Meh... no utility I found for Toshiba or Zenith :'(
So... No I don't like experience of using XT to early 486 laptops in 2024.
Then I have Toshiba portables (2xT3100e) with orange screens. It's lovely, nice, orange screen, plasma, bla bla bla... But OMG, did you try to sit with this computer for more than 10 minutes? Idk maybe I have sensitive eyes, but no.... again. Museum item. Once a month power-on-thing, goody playing...
The only truly original portable I like is Toshiba T3200SXC, somebody sold it to me on eBay with replaced modern screen, but the model itself should have active matrix anyway. Yeah, I can use it. I don't hate it.
Anyway. Pocket386 also has USB, yes it's slow, but who cares if you usually use parallel or serial port for copying files from one retro computer to another?
And then Easy removable CF card as HDD.
Yes I would like to see the same form factor as Pocket 8088 v2, so bigger, I actually didn't think about it when I ordered. That way Parallel port and serial probably could be soldered, rather than have it on a bracket.
But whatever. It's nice little machine.

in short, What I like:
1.Active color screen. I don't care much about quality, just reasonable. Passed.
2.CF card as HDD. Passed
3.USB storage support. Passed
4.More than just PC Speaker. AdLib! Passed

What I miss still from both Chinese books:
1.Real Floppy (USB for example) support without desktop experience like expander and floppy controller you know! Failed

More of a suggestions:
1.It's near impossible with AdLib though! But... PC Speaker IN connected to the same speakers and Line IN, to connect external sound devices. Maybe with other sound card?
2.Better quality. Will see how it goes. Worst experience I had with Sony 1990s laptops rubber on it and accessories and 1990s IBM and Compaq Plastic....

So I don't miss much and really think for laptop representatives of the full experience they are doing good.
OR
Maybe I wrote all this because I didn't have laptops neither in 1980s or 1990s... So no Nostalgia to crappy screens at all.
 
Imagios said:
yes rebuilding it to another case is something I play with in my mind, want a mechanical keyboard, OLED screen, adding a floppy and ports, change the battery to bigger and pass trough charging, if there would be space reducion to a full 16bis ISA for a true sound card, would be a dream :D
Click to expand...
That's awesome concept! I would go for bigger form factor with floppy and better keyboard!

ajacocks said:
For those looking for a different form factor, have you considered taking the PCBs out of a Hand386 or Pocket386 and re-homing them? It’d be a seriously easy job, to knock up a new chassis, if you want an SFF PC, and the original ports are already available, including ISA, serial, parallel, PS/2 and VGA.

Plus, you don’t need to hack up vintage gear. At the price the seller is asking, it’s pretty hard to complain. How many other fully-working 386sx portables can you find for $300? And, given manufacturing cost, I don’t really think these things could be much cheaper.

Quality is certainly iffy, and if you compare to any of my vintage Toshiba or Zenith portables, these come up far short. But, they are available in quantity and _vastly_ cheaper than any of these were sold for.

So, IMO, buy or don’t, as you feel appropriate, but the seller seems to have demonstrated pretty good customer service for those whose machines have died or not worked properly, even if they don’t seem to find it necessary to comply with licenses or to “borrow” @sergey and others’ work.

- Alex
Click to expand...
If I only have time and skills to do that. Sounds great though

VERAULT said:
Also why does the screen shot show windows 95 if its a 386SX? That would be ungodly slow. Its misleading and rather stupid.

I mean I ran windows 94 on my Compaq 486 33mhz laptop and THAT was a lesson in patience.
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It's alright working for basic stuff. I prefer to use Windows 3.11 there though and I go to 95 if the program needs Win 9x. Early 95/3.1 games and progs work good. For anything heavier I have 486+ and Pentium+ laptops.
 
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I wish somebody in China would build something in that form-factor that you can fit a raspberry pi into. Spent months trying to DIY my own pi laptop some years back. Heck even just a simple monitor/keyboard/mouse with USB & HDMI leads(basically a micro crash cart) would be a really fun tool.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I wish somebody in China would build something in that form-factor that you can fit a raspberry pi into. Spent months trying to DIY my own pi laptop some years back. Heck even just a simple monitor/keyboard/mouse with USB & HDMI leads(basically a micro crash cart) would be a really fun tool.
Click to expand...
I have wanted the same thing for years. The only decent ones i remember cost slmost $300 (crow PI)
 
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