I Bought Something Very Silly

so I was about halfway through a video about something rather crafty when a very bad decision that I made suddenly arrived in the mail so we're gonna throw away that Minecraft stuff and uh well actually it'll probably just be next week and instead take a look at this rather Goofy and mostly brand new 386 handheld system that I spent two hundred dollars on we'll talk about where this thing came from take it apart and see what makes a tick and then we'll see if I can get two hundred dollars worth of fun out of it so stay tuned [Music] and if you enjoy that special mix of anticipation bewilderment and Dread that can only come from the arrival of a half-forgotten late night purchase I hope you consider subscribing to the channel so this thing is the aptly named hand 386 and it's a real 386 computer in a handheld form factor as opposed to those dime a dozen handheld emulator consoles that litter eBay and Amazon this thing promises to play your old Dawson early Windows games on Native and pretty decent Hardware now you might be asking how does one make a new late 80s 386 system and I'm glad you asked because the Uber nerd in me got really excited about that part you see 386 systems are actually still used in a ton of industrial controller type applications usually packaged into a system on a chip and this device uses just such an SOC the m6117 which is a single chip containing a 386 SX Edo Ram controller Isa interface IDE interface real-time clock in a whole bunch of other fun stuff basically a complete early 90s 386 SX home computer on a chip if you watch the excellent CPU Galaxy Channel they actually have one of those chips on its normal home an industrial back plane now according to the documentation the m6117d in this thing is recycled from old Industrial Equipment but everything else in here is new it has eight Megs of ram a CF card adapter on the IDE Channel A Chips f-65535 VGA card pumping out 256 colors at 640 by 480 and a Yamaha ymf-262m opl3 sound card and a built-in battery of dubious quality it also supports a PS2 mouse and keyboard VGA output and external 8-bit Isa all in all this might be a really cool way to play wolf 3D which as you might know is literally the only thing I care about when it comes to computer now I'd like to take a moment to address a bit of controversy surrounding this device's Creator as I understand it this device and its sister and 8088 tiny clamshell laptop that kind of looks like a Toshiba libretto they're the brainchild of a retro Computing Enthusiast in China who has the means to produce such devices the 8080 machine however it uses an open source bios built by Sergey kisalev but it not only contravenes the open source license it actually removes sergey's name I'm not saying that the Builder of these devices did that on purpose he could have bought it from a dubious source but at the very least they didn't fully account for the provenance of the open source software that they used again this device does not use that bios but out of gratitude for sergey's hard work and contributions to the Computing World I'll link to his GitHub down below okay so first let's take a look at what else comes in this beautiful retail packaging right after this word about today's sponsor PCB way not only does PCB way offer high quality PCB prototyping and production they also offer on-site PCB assembly and can Source some of the components with their TurnKey service if you're doing a project like this I bet your project needs more than just pcbs printed well PCB way now offers a ton of additional Services high quality 3D printing injection molding CNC Machining and even sheet metal fabrication literally every part of your next project can be prototyped and built with PCB way so if you have any PCB or prototyping needs I hope you give pcbway.com a try alright so here is the device itself or as I believe it's pronounced in Australian the Nugget and it's been running for a little bit now as I've been filming and it's a little a little warm and we'll take a closer look around this thing in a minute let's see what else came in the Box all right we have one anti-static bag full of goodies ooh Ziploc all right we have a uh questionable mobile phone style power brick oh and a breakout board which contains both of the PS2 ports and VGA out okay that is very cool that we will try later for sure because technically this thing can be a desktop oh look it's Lenovo branded yeah look at that okay quick walk through on the device this is a I mean first impressions are it's not the highest quality plastic you can kind of see some of the gubbins from the injection molding here I do like that it's very lightly translucent and you can see the stuff inside especially around the back here this is ISA which we don't have an adapter for uh you probably would need to wire that up yourself this is the PS2 and VGA out which of course we do have the adapter for this USB port is only for storage not for other devices so if you plug a USB flash drive in here it will show up as the D drive and this is the one gigabyte CF card which is connected to IDE because of course CF basically is IDE the power switch is right on the front of the device here which boots it into Windows 95 and MS-DOS 7.10 and it has am bios on it there's also like a screen protector here but it goes underneath the side bezel here so I think we'll have to take it apart to take that off I'm not entirely sure d i r to list the contents of the CF card and this keyboard is nothing to write home about this is uh yeah rubberized feels much like a TV remote control on a budget TV anyway we can type win to get into Windows 95 which let me tell you that's a dream on a 386 SX with eight Megs of memory now we won't go too far into the stuff that's installed on here yet let's take this apart and see what's actually on the inside all right just a bunch of Phillips head screws the brains of the system is right here DM and P m6117d the 386 system on a chip which well controls everything in this thing branching out from there we have the memory the chips and Technology chip a chip labeled bios and a chip labeled video uh Power in we have our lithium ion battery this is supposedly rated for 2500 milliamp hours let's see if this nicely comes off on the front here I don't want to break it before I even have a chance to play Wolfenstein there we go all right this looks like the connector for video this has got to be the video controller board and the ribbon cable up to the LCD you know a lot of thought went into this board actually this is not just some slop it together device this is a well thought out the custom built machine purpose built to reuse that system on a chip for retro Computing purposes I really can't fault that you know okay there we go minty fresh all right so let's see what kind of software is on this thing and uh apologize this has pretty terrible vertical viewing angle so I have to hold it kind of at a very precise angle so I can see it and you can see it but let's start with the uh dir slash W this is not a joy to type on goodness gracious oh there is a game directory let's see what's in there oh my goodness look at that it already has doom and wolf 3D on here along with uh some other stuff Raptor pal and SB vgm and C2 anyway you know what I'm gonna play CD wolf 3D oh there she is oh with sound oh it sounds pretty good there's no external volume control though oh it looks great yeah ad-lib Sound Blaster sound all right let's do it [Music] get psyched oh I can't believe I'm playing it on this goofy device fire is you button prefer open to be space nice oh the goofy sounds okay this thing is more fun already than I expected no actually we're running into some problems here the repeat on the W key is not working right or at least the pressing it down was not registering okay the W button does not like me pressing it with my full finger I have to like hit it with my thumbnail for it to register and stay down once I have the hang of it it's not too bad you know the colors on this display are actually pretty vibrant not bad at all out of here all right well once you get the hang of this keyboard it's not too bad these keys were like plastic or something something hard maybe that would be a little better oh you got me oh it is getting a little bit uncomfortably warm right here all right well it took me far longer than I'd like to admit to actually dig out a PS2 Mouse but here is a nice laser mouse connected through the adapter here and it does work so yeah check that out look at that redraw oh that's uh that's something but yeah let's use this mouse to see what's actually installed on Windows 95 here all right so I have it propped up here so hopefully we can both see what's going on and also trying to angle this to eliminate the screen door effect or the moire pattern on the screen I don't know this screen is actually pretty nice I don't know how to control the brightness but yeah so we have oh look removable disk a disc C and removable disk D which I assume is not going to show anything since there's no USB drive in there uh yeah so we have all the general default Windows 95 stuff we can play the uh hardest to see game of Solitaire ever actually this isn't that bad what else is on here Internet Explorer obviously uh of course we don't have any way to connect to the outside world although there is cereal on here somehow you know at least built into the chipset so again maybe an Isa ethernet card if we wanted to go online with our 386 oh an AOL free trial excellent Let's uh let's get a free trial to AOL apparently this can do 800 by 600 though I'm a little bit afraid to put it into that setting lest we get locked out of here now we've got some MIDI files oh and uh yeah we've got a little flashing red light here now so I think our battery is getting low ooh MIDI [Music] Let's uh plug this into power and then try to use it as a desktop okay so I am way more excited for this than I probably should be but here is my desktop hand 386 setup I have my Giant Sony Trinitron multi-skin 200 SF a filthy e-machines keyboard with Thrift Shop sticker still on it my PS2 laser mouse and two powered speakers with no volume control which may be a mistake I should probably plug the monitor in right all right here goes nothing it is very faint on the display and actually I kind of expected that because according to the documentation using the external VGA will make the inbuilt display dimmer because I think they're just wired in series but yeah look there we go windows 95. let's see if I can just up the brightness on here as far as it'll go now that's what I call a dual head setup yeah you I don't think you can see it but it is still being displayed on the handheld as well okay it is very dim on the display even with brightness really cranked up I mean it's definitely cool that this can be done but uh I don't think this is going to be your desktop replacement wow these speakers must not be shielded very well they are really singing based on whatever is on the display or maybe it's interference from this device we're gonna unplug those for a second yeah look at that this is definitely a 386 Windows Experience just look at this uh look at this lag and paint here it's all straight lines [Laughter] oh goodness save changes no thank you might as well go back to Dos mode and play some games maybe they'll be a little easier to see here it's certainly much easier to type with a real keyboard oh it's not in stereo it's all coming out of one speaker it's louder coming out of the device than out of these speakers which make horrible interference noises it's just very washed out and I don't think there's anything you can do about that because that's just how the VGA is wired up in this thing all right well I guess we have to try Doom right what kind of retro channel would this be if something has doom on it and I didn't try to play Doom oh frame rates are an issue uh all right well this is not the best Doom experience so would I recommend this device absolutely not not a chance for the same price two hundred dollars you can find a heck of a real 386 for back in the day probably with a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse and have a much better gaming experience heck for two hundred dollars you might even be able to find something like a real Toshiba libretto from back in the day which is a much faster machine natively supporting Windows 95 with a good keyboard oh comparatively good and uh yeah bigger screen better gaming experience Better Sound a mouse is built in I mean yeah I would take a libretto over this thing any day that being said though this is pretty neat I mean 200 is a big asking price for this but if you consider that it's more or less a hobbyist project you know releasing a very small quantity in fact I think you only had 11 for sale and they're all sold you know it's kind of cool I really like the use of that system on a chip and I had a lot more fun with this thing than I was expecting so if you know what you're getting into and you're looking for just a neat toy and uh yeah want to play some Wolfenstein 3D something like this is actually pretty cool but that'll do it for this video If you enjoyed it I'd appreciate a thumbs up if you'd like to see more Shenanigans like this please subscribe down below and uh yeah I think maybe in a bonus video we'll try to install some weird software on here like uh an alternative operating system maybe a 386 Linux like tiny core thank you so much for watching and a special thanks to Alex Hoffman Andrew Nicholson Camilla noceda Chris allegreta Chris Biggs Chris Calderon Chris Nelson Control Alt Reese Daniel Hubbard Frodo Jedi Gaspar Heller Greg rutke Harris Brody Jason papaz Justin Hemmings Justin Reed Lyle truid Michael mulhern Paul Spencer Ryan Scott cederbaum Scott Thompson Sue Tech Tom Woodfin Unknown Soldier 41 who are my highest tiered patrons and all of my patreon supporters for helping to make these Shenanigans possible

Channel: Action Retro

Views: 160,469

Keywords: retro, vintage computers, macintosh, apple, retrocomputing, retro computers

Id: Eiutn-P7HVQ

Length: 20min 54sec (1254 seconds)

Published: Sun May 28 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/luis-mercado]

The keyboard is the deal breaker. Can’t even play Wolfenstein without difficulty.

[u/thebeastwithnoeyes]

cool idea, but the execution is a tad lacking

[u/devicemodder2]

I want one soo bad... but can't seem to find any.