Notices by Foone🏳️‍⚧️ (foone@digipres.club), page 2

Have you ever wondered if you can run Microsoft 3D Movie Maker on the Hand386?

You can. It's not fast, but it runs.

@dosnostalgic oh neat, I didn't realize they made a laptop-sized one!

@dosnostalgic https://foone.org/ponies/dosnostalgic/funkys.vgm

So my roommate bought that weird Hand386 portable PC that popped up on aliexpress. Let's tear it down (nondestructively for once, since I'm borrowing it).

#hand386 #teardown

first off, lemme get the spoilers out of the way: It's real, it runs DOS/Windows 95, and it can run Doom (badly) and VGAPride.

It's easy to open (this image came out blurry, but I'm just using it for navgiation)

We've got two terminal connectors on the left, plus a 3.5mm audio jack. The right has a USB port and a barrel jack power connector.

First off, the CPU. This is surprising! It's an DM&P ALi M6117D.
This is a modified version of the chip made by ALi/ULi, licensed to DM&P. ALi's chip division was bought by Nvidia in 2006.

So the M6117D is a 386SX-compatible system on a chip.
It's a static 386SX Core (apparently licensed from Intel?) plus ram controller, peripheral controllers, IDE support. It runs at 25-40mhz, and up to 16 megabytes of RAM

Chip info here:
Also, I was wrong. Apparently it goes up to 64 megabytes of RAM:

https://www.dmp.com.tw/app/webcamera/pdf/m6117d.pdf

Next to the CPU, we've got four DRAM chips. AMIC A420616AS-50F, 2-megabyte chips.
So we're looking at 8 megabytes.

Then we've got our VGA chip: A Chips&Technologies 65535.
This is a fully integrated chip with built in CRT controller/flat panel support, RAMDAC, and and clocks.
It supports up to 1280x1024 resolution with enough VRAM, or 640x480 16bpp truecolor.

For VRAM, a Sharp LH6A4260K-60, which I'm pretty sure is a 512 kilobyte chip, but I can't be sure.

The really surprising chip is this, a Yamaha OPL3 YMF262-M...
Yeah, this thing has real OPL3 sound. Assuming this chip is genuine, of course.

There's two SST39SF512 half-megabyte flash chips.
The left is labeled VIDEO and the right is labeled BIOS.

So here's another blurry navigation-picture for the other side of the PCB. The interesting thing here is that they've got the keyboard on a separate PCB.

The last interesting thing about the top of the PCB is that there's another speaker, labeled SP1.
There's two stereo speakers as well, so I suspect this is just used for PC Speaker, and was easier than merging the audio in with those other speakers

It's a 60 pin connector. 8-bit ISA is 62 pins, 16-bit ISA is 98 pins.

So if they just merged some grounds, 60-pins is totally doable.

Games included:
Doom, Wolf3d, XianJian QiXia Zhuan (aka Chinese Paladin), Tyrian, Raptor: Call of the Shadows, and Uncharted Waters: New Horizons
Daikoukai Jidai II

Storage is on a 2 gigabyte CF card. It's got Dos 7.1, Windows 95, and a few games pre-installed on it, plus a driver for the CH375 USB storage chip

So over by the USB port, we've got a CH375B.
This is an 8-bit IO chip for USB, specifically for storage.
(it's also an 8051-based core! there's always an 8051)