My Pocket 386 arrived! It seems to have basically the same specs as the Hand386, but in a laptop form factor. There's a few new options for managing the video, and the built-in screen isn't as horribly shit this time.
Pocket 386. I'll need to put some stickers on this thing. Maybe a "Don't copy that floppy!" or something equally DOS. I think I still have some Duke Nukem 1 stickers...
Left side has the removable hard drive (CD card), USB slot (which is just used for mass storage, it's not generic USB host), and an unlabeled port. I believe this one is designed for parallel port use, it came with an adapter.
Back of the laptop, we've got a power jack (12V 1.5A), and 4 slots. One is PS/2 keyboard/mouse and VGA, I think one is GPIO, the far right one is ISA, and I'm not sure what the other is (I don't have my manual handy)
Found the image on their site which lists the ports. I was right, except the right two back ports are both ISA: You can combine the two for 16-bit ISA now, not just 8bit!
Under those panels: The top-left one shows the OPL3 chips, and it has trimpots for volume (left and right?) There's also a Mini-ISA/GPI socket, which I think is documented somewhere
OKAY, so, internals. (Sorry I'm gonna have to go fast and skip image descriptions, I'm about to leave for work)
First off, the keyboard: It's mini scissor switches, pretty standard for a tiny laptop like this. We do have two speakers, so there's presumably stereo sound. I'll have to run a stereo test later.
That video card is very barebones. We've got a VRAM chip, flash chip, and the GPU. Everything else is some resistors, caps, and a transistor. It uses that same mini-ISA connector. I don't think that's a pre-existing standard, I think they just invented it right here.
Same CPU as the Hand386: A DM&P M6117D. This is a Nvidia chip licensed to DM&P, originally by ALi. It's a 386SX-compatible SOC, based on an Intel design, running at 25-40 mhz (this one is clocked at 40) and can handle up to 16mb of ram
USB is powered by a WCH CH375B. This is the same chip as on those ISA-to-USB cards. It's basically an 8051 acting as a USB host. The driver does the heavy lifting, but it is USB storage only.
I forgot to check which version of the driver it's using. There's a bunch, with varying capabilities.
An XLSEMI XL4015E1: A DC to DC converter. It takes 8-36V and converts it to an output of 1.25v to 32v, depending on how it's configured. I'm betting this drops the voltage from the 12v AC adapter to a charging voltage for the battery.
U31 here is an Xysemi XR2981 24-watt step-up DC-DC converter. This takes something between 3.3 and 5v and turns it into a configured voltage. I'm guessing this is taking the 3.7v from the battery and turning it into the 5v this thing runs on
U32 is an INJOINIC IP2312 battery management IC. So this is probably used to measure the battery voltage to estimate capacity, as well as send a LOW VOLTAGE POWER OFF IMMEDIATELY signal to the main CPU
over here by the battery is a Alpha & Omega AO4453 MOSFET. I'm guessing this is involved in switching the battery from charging to discharging circuits
Then a small pile of 74-series logic chips, 10 in total. I'm guessing this is all being used to select out the parallels port/GPIO and make that work, but I don't have time to dig into each of these chips
One nice thing about the new LCD control system is that you can set it to widescreen mode if you want. This doesn't seem to do anything to the graphics card, just how the output is interpreted, so results will definitely vary
That's powered by a Realtek RTD2660 flat panel display controller. This takes in analog RGB video or composite/component video, and turns it into LVDS you can pipe into an LCD.
so there's a lot of fun projects you could make with that design. With a few level shifters and 74-series logic you could make an adapter to an ESP32 and give this thing wifi.
oh yeah, the other new thing about this one over the pocket386:
the BIOS has now added an option where you can enable PS/2 mouse emulation. This makes your programs think there's a PS/2 mouse, which is controlled with the arrow keys
the manual also says you can restore a corrupted CF card by using the Pocket386.gho image, but that image doesn't seem to actually be online anywhere. I'll have to image the card
it comes with the same stuff as the Hand386, maybe a few more games. You've got Planet X3, Doom, Wolf3d, a few other shareware titles and some benchmarking utilities.
Doom runs, but very slowly. This is a 40mhz 386, after all.
I haven't tried FastDoom on it, it may be better suited
@johnlogic they're hard to find online in non-faked form these days. This one looks way too new. Best case, it's a legit chip, just repainted to give it a newer date code and clean it up, to hide the fact they desoldered it off a scrap PCB
The OSD for the display is controlled by the keyboard, so there's some kind of communication between the CPU and the scaler. I wonder if it's possible to use that to detect if you're in widescreen mode or not?
@foone Mine just arrived today, did you have to do anything to get your battery to work? Wondering if I’ve got a faulty one or am just missing something, but there doesn’t seem to be much about these online yet.
@foone Thanks, sounds like mine is faulty then. Wouldn’t come on at all out of the box, and the charge light comes on when plugged in, but after sitting “charging” for a few hours, it still won’t run on battery power. Works great plugged in though.