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Pocket 386

I just got one, along with the add-on serial port and the 3-slot, 8-bit ISA bus card. This thing is a great little toy! Don't buy it with the hope of making it your daily driver but it's definitely fun to play with DOS and Win 95 again.
I just hope there will be a 16-bit ISA add on. The machine has the I/O pins for one but currently there is only the 8-bit interface. Yes, it's rather expensive for what you get but what you get is a neat little package. I also like
being able to set up an environment on a CF card then swapping out for a different environment just by swapping the CF cards.

I don't care what's inside as long as it all works together. It does! I had my fill of fiddling with hardware back in the '70s when I built a Poly-88 and a Sphere 330 (remember them?) Now I get to play with old software.
To all those who have nothing good to say about this machine: À chacun ses goûts (to each his own) but I'm definitely in the pro camp!
 
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czunit said:
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....
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It has an add-on serial connector (about $11.xx USD) that is standard RS-232. It's not as convenient as a built-in port but it works fine.
 
kirikl said:
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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Since Win 98 and above require a 486 or better, Win 95 is as high as you'll get on the Pocket386 anyway. Just for fun, I tried to install Win 98 and got the 486 needed message.
 
Debian 3.0, FreeBSD 5.5, NetBSD 4 work on 386 out of the box. NetBSD is from 2007.

And it looks like some checks are preventing 98 to run on 386, there could be a way of installing in on a certain 386 configuration, I don't know is Pocket386 sufficient.
I'm pretty sure Windows 2000 kernel uses instructions not available to 386, I'm pretty sure Windows 98 doesn't.

Of course, there is no reason to run Windows 98 on an ISA platform over Windows 95.
 
DS is just a device that can run emulators. You can run dosbox anywhere. Somebody's fridge may "run" Windows 98 that way too.

The practical difference between 95 and 98 is in driver model, as driver model was changed to support faster hardware via ever-evolving APIs like DirectX, but old one remained alive for legacy hardware. So when you use 98 on ISA machine you aren't actually using anything extra that 98 has to offer above 95.

It's worthwhile to remember why you upgraded originally if you liked Windows 95. This is important because most people didn't, for whatever reason. I know people that claim 98SE is the best OS ever, but the hardware they ran it on, and software they used on it, would run even better and faster on Windows 95. So if you actually liked 95 you'd prolong and upgrade only when you hit the limit of the OS, which was my case with 3D programming and emulators back in very early 2000s. I had to upgrade to get native speed AGP WDM driver and DirectX 9 for Nintendo 64 emulator to work correctly.

It's an interesting experiment to see whether it can be done, 98 on 386, but for functionality, no difference to 95, just increased system usage.

/end-pro-win95-rant
 
I can tell you exactly why I upgraded to Win98: I bought a K6-2/400. They had a rather famous showstopper bug on Win95 with fast K6s, which was only officially patched for OSR2. I can recall being rather miffed having to spend $100 of my upgrade budget on a new operating system.
 
joefil1991 said:
Has anyone had issues when using an external mouse and trying to play Wolfenstein 3D or Doom on the Pocket 386? Using WASD and the mouse, the character will continue moving even after I stop holding the key. I've tried multiple different mouses and had the same issue, though it seems more like a keyboard issue.
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I noticed some odd behavior with the built-in keyboard as well. I'm mostly using an external PS2 KB now which is working great, but I'm unable to get the PS2 mouse to work yet. It's an HP optical mouse. I may try to find a different mouse to try because the built-in 'mouse' is garbage; it's not possible to drag-and-drop or move diagonally because you can only use one key at a time. Which mouse and driver combination are you using for DOS, and did you change the mouse support option in the BIOS?
 
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