A new little restoration project.
We have computers with 8086, 188, 286, 486, P1, P2 and P3 at home, but we didn't have a 386 machine. I saw a listing of an Amstrad 386 laptop that got me curious: there were photos of a working greyscale LCD, and the seller said they recapped the board, but couldn't quite make it fully work still, so it was sold for cheap as "parts".
On arrival the screen was not working, and the computer insisted that something was wrong. The keyboard was dead, hard drive was dead, and even a poor floppy drive inside was dead. Video card had signs of corrosion. The computer has one ISA slot, and it boots when there's an external video card and a keyboard. The floppy drive cabling isn't standard, but it was easy to mod a spare drive by cutting some tracks and soldering bodge wires. Now we can boot into DOS.
Internal video is going to be an interesting fix. After washing, VGA BIOS seems to be working, but there's no video signal generated. Thankfully there's a schematic, and it's "simple".
@nina_kali_nina those IRQ assignments in the BIOS caused me physical pain.
@nbomb they usually happen when you have lots of peripherals. This machine has only one ISA slot, and everything else seems to be neatly assigned separate interrupts?
@nina_kali_nina yup… just gave me painful flashbacks about having to juggle interrupts for my soundblaster 16, modem, NIC, SCSI card, and whatever else I had in my PC back in the 90s, haha
I’m so glad that particular part of computing is no longer a thing.
@nina_kali_nina do you have both SX and DX variants of the 486, and is this a 386SX or a 386DX?
@oblomov this is a 386sx. I only have 486DX and 486SL which is also DX. My dad has a full range of 386 and 486s dies, including overdrive models, so I have played with all of them as a kid, at least
@nina_kali_nina
I love how old style laptops look.
@kirtai yeah, the design looks nothing like soulless bricks. What surprised me was 2 hour battery life - and the battery is tiny compared to the computer
@nina_kali_nina
Have you seen the Ampère WS-1 APL laptop? It's all swooshy and was designed by the same guy who designed the Datsun 240Z.
It's the one I want most :)
@kirtai oh, that is a snowflake design to the max! Thank you for sharing
@nina_kali_nina we went from 8088 with cga graphics to pentium 90. That was quite the jump! Especially when you consider the new pc had 3 times the size of the 8088 hard drive in RAM.
@oook the colours! The resolution! The media!!!
@nina_kali_nina exactly. For decades I could only browse magazines full of vga games with envy.
Well not totally true as I got Sega Master System then Megadrive consoles. Still the pentium opened the way to making music with trackers, play simulators or games with video cinematics.