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

@dosnostalgic they should have a person standing in the front of the theater with a nerf gun and instructions to shoot if anyone says a fucking word

I tried to cat a text file to my printer and this is what happened

EGA is the hardest of the DOS video standards to look up info on.
CGA lasted a shorter period but it had a long tail. EGA was only a thing for a couple years, so all the resources on "EGA programming" are really like "EGA/VGA programming" and they tend to ignore the EGA half of that, and instead pretend it's just CGA with a few more colors

@dosnostalgic if it does it on the right dates, that's a less than simple calculation, so that's surprising!

I'm still trying to get moved into new storage units for my retro tech stuff.
If you've enjoyed any of my posting about tech, a donation of a dollar or two would be really helpful. Thanks!

https://ko-fi.com/fooneturing

@dosnostalgic oh dear. Watching this would only hurt me, but I am still tempted

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.