Pocket 386 supports external accessories and will just barely run Windows 95.
Running anything on a 386 was NOT fun. I don’t think I’d pay $200 for the privilege of hating it all over again.
At the same time, it forced me to learn. Nowadays, every game and app you’d want is a few clicks away, and most likely it’ll just work without having to think about IRQ settings or COM ports or whether there’s enough space on your 50 MB hard disk.
Yeah, but they should have gone with a 486DX, or SX at least. HUGE difference. The 386 was just too damned frustrating, but it was the first work PC I ever laid hands on. For a personal computer, I upgraded from a 286 to a Pentium 200.
This is cool but not for $200. That’s way overpriced for something this underpowered.
Companies are actually willing to pay a lot of money for legacy hardware.
This is actual hardware. Yes simple arm cores can pretty faithfully emulate much of this. But that’s emulation. These are bespoke devices, built from actual old chips. Offering a level of comparability and predictability emulation can’t always achieve. It isn’t for everyone.
Adrian Black ended up with a non functioning unit sent to him by a viewer that bought one. The seller rather than pay for postage for the broken one to be sent back to China just told them to keep it and sent them a replacement instead. Adrian ends up troubleshooting and fixing it but you can get a pretty good look at everything going on inside and some of the old chips involved.
The M6117C also isn’t the original and not that old. Also the 8MB of RAM aren’t true to the original.
I’m not sure. I occasionally use emulation. And I think it’s fine. Unless you’re a speed runner and need everything to be exact to the frame timing, you won’t notice. Certainly not for a desktop UI like the Win 3.11 on the photo. I guess it depends on the use-case.
Something like a FPGA or an ESP32 can also be repaired, replaced, programmed and most of the things a CPU or different architecture can do. And if the emulation layer doesn’t have too many flaws, it’ll be pretty realistic. Not exactly the same thing, but I think it’ll do for practically any use-case. And it comes with other benefits.
I think you’re allowed to do it just for the sake of it. But I often see people using an original SNES because “emulation is shit” and then they proceed to connect it to the TV set in their livingroom, which isn’t even close to the original experience because it adds lots of latency and doesn’t have interlacing and the colors are different than on a CRT, too. I think that’s just having strong opinions despite being uneducated. And I think I’m equally as well off with my Raspberry Pi and Emulationstation. (Which can also run DOS games.)
In the end everyone is entitled to their opinion. But this also isn’t the original (You can get an old Laptop… I have one with an 486.) But this isn’t the original but a replica. And it’s debatable (in my opinion) whether it’s the CPU architecture that does the realism, or other factors. I think for realism, you’d need a black and white liquid crystal display, a NiMH battery that degrades fast if you don’t charge it right and half the amount of RAM at most. And maybe just a floppy drive. The CPU is something you wouldn’t notice with the current state of technology.
I feel like I should be hacking a Gibson from grand central station with this.
The first two ads I see under the article are for hearing aids, which probably describes the target market for this thing.
What is their intended market? I see no real use for such a box. Heck, even Linux will probably come to a crawl on that box. And you can probably build something ARM based for the same price with eight gigabytes of RAM and running circles around the 386.
