• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Brand new NOT New Old Stock 386 based Laptop on AliExpress?

eXTended8088

eXTended8088

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2008
Messages
86
Location
Central PA/Upstate NY
Good Day All,

My apologies if this has been posted elsewhere and also if this is the wrong forum for this. I ran across this article last night about a brand new 386 based "Laptop" being sold. This is NOT New Old Stock.

www.tomshardware.com

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

Nintendo 2DS form factor device runs at 40 MHz, includes 8MB RAM, and has 1GB CF card storage.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com

They also talk about a brand new 8088 based "laptop" as well!

I am tempted... Thoughts?
 
Apparently they removed @sergey 's compyright information from the BIOS. If anyone can get in touch with the company and request that it be re-added, that would be appreciated.

- Alex
 
I saw this at VOGONS, made me think this should be called the "PC-Boy" or something like that, looks like an MS-DOS Game Boy to me. Tempting to pick one up though, would probably make a great DOS portable game machine. Was not aware there that it was Sergey's design ('ve been reading some of his stuff, might play with custom PC hardware later on).
 
eXTended8088 said:
Good Day All,

My apologies if this has been posted elsewhere and also if this is the wrong forum for this. I ran across this article last night about a brand new 386 based "Laptop" being sold. This is NOT New Old Stock.

www.tomshardware.com

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

Nintendo 2DS form factor device runs at 40 MHz, includes 8MB RAM, and has 1GB CF card storage.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com

They also talk about a brand new 8088 based "laptop" as well!

I am tempted... Thoughts?
Click to expand...

I guess gaming is the big driver of mainstream retro (...and in other news, water is wet).

I looked it over, thought it was interesting and would never buy it because, for me, it is not purchase interesting, it is read the article interesting. I don't see a price there - did anyone?
I did see the mention of the BOOK 8088 - A new retro 8088 DOS system. I see it here: The US $226 version was a lot more interesting to me - especially with inclusion of that little ISA card interface. I would love to see a teardown. Also love the "..IBM PC XT compatible machine 8088 8086CPU microcomputer principle". Wonder who made whatever is in there.

But, there is nothing that comes close to any documentation that I saw and the risk of a $226 hemmoroid is, well, a consideration for me. I guess if I made yt vids, I might jump on it, but it doesn't pass the sniff test...for me. Still if anyone gets one, I would like to hear about the experience
 
At even $250USD that's a pretty competitive price compared to the Toshiba Libretto. It's still very expensive (that's over $330CAD) but this is a "new" product competing against the demand for a UMPC form factor DOS compatible portable from the 90's. For the vast majority of people paying the current value for a Libretto this checks a lot of the boxes and saves you having to then deal with aged plastics and dead batteries.

I'm usually pretty critical of expensive VC fads but I can get behind this one. If anything it pulls down the value of the Libretto by reducing demand, which is a big plus.

Edited: it is also worth noting that when I last checked two days ago the listing for the handheld ( https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005005542582463.html ) was listed as no longer available (but notes 60 as sold, so they must of just sold out), but the folding UMPC was still available at $284CAD. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005528944178.html
 
Last edited:
It's an interesting concept but the build quality seems pretty bad. More like a cheap toy than a notebook computer. Also if you look closely at the screenshots you can see that the leftmost column of the screen is missing. Not sure if it's hidden under the bezel or something else is wrong...
 
Plasma said:
It's an interesting concept but the build quality seems pretty bad. More like a cheap toy than a notebook computer. Also if you look closely at the screenshots you can see that the leftmost column of the screen is missing. Not sure if it's hidden under the bezel or something else is wrong...
Click to expand...

Reading between the lines of some of the description I suspect the screen is just a *very* cheap LCD+scaler board interfaced to the analog output lines of whatever VGA chip they used. (The AliExpress listing literally says "The VGA interface can be connected to an external display, but it will affect the brightness of the LCD and display at the same time", which implies that its VGA port is just wired in parallel.) The aspect ratio of the screen is clearly wrong for 640x480; I would guess it's an 800x480 LCD and it's doing cruddy non-pixel-precise horizontal scaling and, if a column really is missing, it could just be a scaling/sync problem. Wouldn't surprise me if you dug into it you'd find the board behind the LCD display still has a header on it for control buttons and it's possible you could tweak it, but, let's be frank, precision isn't the name of the game here.
 
If you watch more closely all the video of it when the screen resolution changes, that it is an autoscaling display driver. Because on some screen changes, it is correct in text mode, and sometimes it is not correct in text mode. It only affects text mode. In terms of quality of design, I'm not sure if they have the ability to fix it on their current design, since they left it in there like that.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Reading between the lines of some of the description I suspect the screen is just a *very* cheap LCD+scaler board interfaced to the analog output lines of whatever VGA chip they used. (The AliExpress listing literally says "The VGA interface can be connected to an external display, but it will affect the brightness of the LCD and display at the same time", which implies that its VGA port is just wired in parallel.) The aspect ratio of the screen is clearly wrong for 640x480; I would guess it's an 800x480 LCD and it's doing cruddy non-pixel-precise horizontal scaling and, if a column really is missing, it could just be a scaling/sync problem. Wouldn't surprise me if you dug into it you'd find the board behind the LCD display still has a header on it for control buttons and it's possible you could tweak it, but, let's be frank, precision isn't the name of the game here.
Click to expand...
The HAND386 thing has VGA, but I think the Book 8088 is CGA only. I see snow in part of the video and there doesn't appear to be any external VGA port. Which is a bit odd since VGA probably would have been cheaper to implement...
 
I don’t disagree, but square aspect screens are significantly more expensive, these days.

Frustrating, but understandable.

- Alex
 
Plasma said:
The HAND386 thing has VGA, but I think the Book 8088 is CGA only. I see snow in part of the video and there doesn't appear to be any external VGA port. Which is a bit odd since VGA probably would have been cheaper to implement...
Click to expand...

I guess I thought the comment about the missing column was in reference to the 386sx version… but my comment about the type of LCD panel and display still applies.

In the other thread about these things I mentioned I’m curious about what they’re using for the CGA setup; since the main system chipset is a once-common XT system controller I assume they also found some kind of “CGA on a chip” instead of making it from scratch. Such things did exist, I remember reading the datasheet for a flat-pack that just needed external memory and could emulate either CGA or MDA/Hercules not that long ago, but, yeah, curious where they found such an animal in sufficient quantities to do a production run and if the chip is available ala cart from the usual sketchy suspects…

And of course there’s the question of how they glued a CGA chip to the display. A couple years ago I bought a really nasty cheap LCD/dirt common scaler board from a sketch Chinese reseller because I was curious if the scaler, which had VGA, HDMI, and composite inputs, would accept 15kHz input on the RGB input. The answer was ‘no’, which lead to a deep dive into the datasheet of the scaler chip (badly translated Chinese) and… it looked like it might be possible at least to get it to work with a custom firmware. Wondering if they did that, or used some other trickery like an external scan doubler, or what.
 
Thanks for your thoughts, everyone. I decided not to pick one up due to one of our members work being "plagiarized" for a lack of a better word. I just had another article regarding this in my feed last night, and it said the 386 model was sold out and the 8088 model still had stock as of the writing.
 
I saw these making the rounds a few weeks ago, but I'm pretty skeptical on them even being real. Most of the articles would link to sellers with zero feedback. It's possible these are real, but as a frequent aliexpress shopper, there were a number of red flags on these listings. It was a bit annoying that all these news outlets were promotiong some random listing on aliexpress as well, without doing any due diligence on the product or sellers before just sharing links with their readers.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top