Hand 386 Delivers A "True 386 Processor" in a Handheld

erek

erek

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Retro gaming handheld

"Like the Hand 386, the Book 8088 offers pretty good specs for the era to which it harkens back. Key specifications include 640KB of RAM (ought to be enough for anyone?), 512MB of CF-card IDE storage, CGA graphics, and optional Yamaha audio. This portable is only recommended for running DOS, versions of Windows up to 3.0, and games / apps from that era.

The Book 8088 also retails for about $195, with an estimated delivery of June 7."

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Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/hand-386-handheld
 

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Nice little piece of wistful remembrance, but in all honesty, I'm sure you can find an old 486 laptop at some junk or surplus site, complete with its own sound chip, and at a small fraction of the above price.

I remember seeing an old Ambra 486 SX 33 laptop in working condition at some second store for $25, complete with its "massive" 120 megabyte hard drive.
 
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Lakados said:
Emulation is good but you will always have the diehards who want the true hardware.

My first PC was an 8088 so for nostalgia I kinda want one….

And that how they get you hooked.
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Yep. I ended up getting a mister and an analogue pocket. Not exactly true hardware, but its a step up from software emulation. But it is just a step up that mainly only diehards will care about.

I have a few games that don't run properly in dosbox. They run good enough, that the casual player will see it as working, but some of the finer points of the game rely on quirks of older machines that aren't exactly kosher. For example, in Ultima VII, there's an earth quake effect that doesn't work in dosbox correctly. Someone did create a fan made patch for the game which makes it work better, but it's not 100% perfect.
 
oddly i would be interested in something like this but I am saying no to CGA graphics and also could have put 2 or 4 megs of ram in there so I can use emm386.

edit : nevermid read the article. Its VGA and 8 meg of ram with what looks like 40mhz speeds.
 
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I don’t think there is anything from that era that I would want perfect 1:1 from. The analog pocket is more interesting to me. As is true hardware game systems in general.
 
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UnknownSouljer said:
I don’t think there is anything from that era that I would want perfect 1:1 from. The analog pocket is more interesting to me. As is true hardware game systems in general.
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The pocket isn't perfect either unfortunately, but its a step in the right direction.

But, a couple weeks ago, I was working on some Apple 2 stuff.

Now, if you've ever seen it, you'll notice the fringing. Because stuff like HGR, purple can only appear on even pixels, and green can only appear on odd pixels. This is why you can never get 1 pixel of black next to 1 pixel of white when doing colored graphics, because all of the sudden, you're now telling it to be a colored pixel. So, this all is easy enough to emulate with an FPGA.

Now, the kicker comes in that drawing lines on top of each other. This actually can produce incorrect colors depending on the display used, and was abused by some older games to create some dithering effects. Easy enough to emulate in software, but replicating just the hardware without the display would create some incorrect results.
 
Nytegard said:
The pocket isn't perfect either unfortunately, but its a step in the right direction.

But, a couple weeks ago, I was working on some Apple 2 stuff.

Now, if you've ever seen it, you'll notice the fringing. Because stuff like HGR, purple can only appear on even pixels, and green can only appear on odd pixels. This is why you can never get 1 pixel of black next to 1 pixel of white when doing colored graphics, because all of the sudden, you're now telling it to be a colored pixel. So, this all is easy enough to emulate with an FPGA.

Now, the kicker comes in that drawing lines on top of each other. This actually can produce incorrect colors depending on the display used, and was abused by some older games to create some dithering effects. Easy enough to emulate in software, but replicating just the hardware without the display would create some incorrect results.
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Quake 386 boots

 
This might be cool if not for the price. The AE page says it supports PS/2 inputs but I don't see any mention of a breakout cable.
 
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Unabomber said:
Nice little piece of wistful remembrance, but in all honesty, I'm sure you can find an old 486 laptop at some junk or surplus site, complete with its own sound chip, and at a small fraction of the above price.

I remember seeing an old Ambra 486 SX 33 laptop in working condition at some second store for $25, complete with its "massive" 120 megabyte hard drive.
Click to expand...
Probably wouldn't be hard to find free with a little digging. The tower I have 98 installed on was a freebie. Fully functional aside from the plastic spider shoved into the floppy drive.
 
Its hard for me to tell from the article, does this thing have an external monitor port? Even if its VGA?
 
Dan_D said:
This is retarded. Phones are already faster than this and even the Toshiba Libretto was better than this back in the day. Well, the screen wasn't but most models were Pentiums. WTF is this good for?
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I have to agree. I mean I can see the appeal of retro gear, some people like doing things the true old school way not emulated... Fine but this is not that, we never had handhelds like this in the 386 days. So it isn't a real retro experience if that's you thing.

Now if your thing is just playing retro stuff in a modern small formfactor, well as people already pointed out DOSBox works on a phone, modern chips are fast enough to emulate it even on non-x86 architecture.
 
Nice video.

I'd still be interesting in the 386 version. Be nice if it had a VGA port though I suppose Ebay could provide an ISA video card (I dont think the appellation GPU applies).

More as a novelty and a Dos Box in hardware.

Be better if is were a 386dx by far. Lets hope for the 2.0 model.
 
Hey, someone wanted one and someone else knew how to build one.
And they were able to build one - all the tooling and components and materials can be had by anyone with half a brain and some money.
It's an epic time in computing, even if the product seems retarded from certain standpoints.

That said, my joke reply would be:
"You can't emulate a washing machine or a microwave oven within 50 ft crashing your machine randomly!"
 
What is old becomes new again, I guess. Not sure what the appeal would be over emulation, since it's not exactly an accurate 'retro' experience.
 
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