So some of you that watched til the end might have seen a sad farewell message mourning the death of the machine. Well you'll be happy (or indifferent) to know that after some new caps, she lives again! 😄
@@kaitlyn__L your ability to read is questionable, most stuff he does is from the 2000's, he has a handful of older videos only a handful. Maybe try reading comprehension before you comment?
4:53 I bought a Compaq Luggable for school in the early 90s used for $99. It was literally the cheapest DOS computer for sale in Philadelphia. The computer store was in downtown Philadelphia, right in the center city district. I parked like 10 blocks away to get cheaper parking (I was shopping, but I didn't know I was going to buy anything) and so I had to carry that thing for like those 10 blocks. It is both heavy and fragile. The worst combination., The salesman was really cool and he was like, "you're a starving student? I got just what you need" It was loaded with software too, so I didn't have to buy any software.
Great work with the montage, the restauration, you needed to be quite resilient to get another machine and finally get things the way you wanted. I love everything about this machine, these luggable systems were something I would dream about while paging PC magazines back in the day. Congrats on another video.
Love that plasma display! Wow! Commander Keen looks so good on that! IMO: a 286 is pretty much the minimum for a usable PC experience. I've never been able to get into the older 8086 and 8088 machines; they're just too darn slow. Also, I agree: GEOS on these older PCs is a breath of fresh air. I first discovered it as the "shell" around America Online for DOS back on my 486 SX/33. Also also: You mention it taking some getting used to, but here's how messed up I am: I love the AT keyboard layout so much (also similar: Apple IIe / IIc / IIgs layout) that I remap all of my modern machines to put the Ctrl / Cmd key in the place of Caps Lock. Great video! Love to see a Pixel Pipes vid on my timeline again!
More often than not the driver chips are still fine on gas plasmas. What ive found its the connections around the screen itself you need to heat them up and that seems to fix them.
Good to see a new clip from you 🎉 loved the portable 3 back in the day. Would prop up the unit on the family coffee table and have the keyboard on my lap. Spent hours programming and writing notes… and maybe a bit of sim city/leaderboard golf
I have 2x of these Portable 3's. One of them has vertical lines on it but otherwise boots and works fine. I was thinking I could reflow the solder, but it sounds like it might be the chips themselves. The other one went BANG when being tested by a friend. I think it was a bad tant, I wasn't there so not sure. I've not had time to go into them yet. Both need new keyboard cables. I was DREADING figuring out how to replace the spinning rust of a HDD inside, so I was very pleased to see that you can use a cheapo SD/IDE. Absolutely great video, so glad you are still out there in the hobby and making content too! Cheers!
Oh nooo!!! Did it died??? I'm in the process of rebuilding one. I gave mine away in 2005 or so and had regrets soon after. ShuttleTech had an external ~500MB hard drive back in the 90s that connected via the parallel port and was powered by a Y-splitter for the keyboard cord. Back in 1999 I had Windows 3.11 on mine and was writing my thesis on it using Word. I publish regularly now and am hoping to get my new one recovered so I can get back to writing again with it. I agree.. it's a glorious system and very fun to work on - when it's working!!
I scored one of these years ago, trouble was it sucked heaps of power and all but acts as a hair dryer, heat wise. So I passed it off to a fellow worker wanting to use it as a terminal on a PDP11 or something similar.
Great vid, I definitely love seeing these beauties get a new lease on life. Also really love your menu system and the very involved demo. Glad my keyboard repair vid could be of assistance, too!
Yeah man your series was great! Helped a lot. Now the machine stopped posting so I may have to rewatch some of your videos to see what's what. It just has a blinking cursor and won't count the RAM.
Excellent video. As a field service technician, I lugged a 386 version of this to customer sites. It ran some proprietary software, and was also used to run an EPROM programmer.
Long time no see, and your one of my favorite tech youtubers, not to mention Mr Phil. Also in your games menu I love the Wargames referance. "Shall we play a game?" Do i get a prize? lol j/k
DOS 6.22 can format up to 2GB Partitions (limit of FAT-16) and handle drives up to 8GB (limit of Interrupt 0x13). Most likely the limits you encountered were the result of the system's BIOS having the ~500MB Limitation, which is typically the result of trying to save space in things like the CMOS RAM by only using 4 bits for the heads and thus limiting the number of heads at a maximum of 16. (1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors per track, 512 byte sectors = 504MiB. (528MB if using decimal).
2:00 Oh a popped tantalum! Had the same thing happen on the CGA card of my Portable II, but I also had the camera rolling and the shell off so I saw the explosion live 😂
For 3D printers: many libraries have a makerlab you can access to get help with 3d printing for cost of materials or close to it. Might be worth looking into if you're near a city and want to get a better drive cage going.
I'm in to plasma-stuff too 😎 I have Toshiba T3200, T3200SX and T5200. That T5200 is actually pimped a litte: Ti486SXL2/40 with cache flush circuit, DIY 40pin SIMMs so 12MB RAM, 10GB HDD, modified BIOS with support for the CPU and included XTIDE. ISA-slots are filled with 3COM 509 and Gravis Ultrasound MAX. This thing is mostly used to play tracker music at retrolanparties 🤓 It runs FastDoom quite well too. And all this with plasma-glory...
i used to have a portable that made the same squeaky noises, i had to replace all of the orange tantalums on the motherboard to get it going, then few weeks later another one blew inside the psu near a heat sink with a scary cloud of smoke, i replaced it also and that made the machine work again
What I did with my Portable 3 is I just left it set to Type 17 formatted a 530mb conner I had laying around in another machine installed dos and games on it and plopped it into my portable 3 and it boots and is able to use the full formatted size of the drive.
Dos 6.22 can even format up to 2G FAT 16 partition. And it can access up to 2 partitions (one primary and one extended with many logical volumes, the total sum of all of them being max 8G). Natively. Dos 5 the same. That only if the BIOS is able to recognize the capacity of the HDD, as some old BIOS had a 526M limit. To overcome that limitation, can use a Disk Manager software (from Ontrack, Seagate) that install a Dynamic Disk Overlay, to patch the BIOS at boot, in the MBR.
I’ve had great success with Mercari when it comes to vintage machines (though admittedly not as much lately, especially after they raised their shipping rates multiple times). Got a 5150 for $70 shipped with a model M, a nice P3 machine, a TAM (which I actually bought from their UI guy) and a bunch of Apple II stuff all from there at great prices. The shipping rates when the app first appeared in the US were incredibly good. They had to been losing their shirt subsidizing them.
Not only was the original the most-compatible clone at the time, it was more-compatible than some of IBM's own sequel machines! (Or so said the Compaq founders in a documentary about the company.)
Fun run through, a very nice machine for the era if you could afford it heh. Some really nice and easy to use interface software, like a DOS front end heh. Shame about the display problems, even if the chips had some kind of modern replacement option the screen itself will eventually quit. I do think they're worth running as long as you are able to since I don't think we'll see gas plasma ever again. Yeah so bright, sharp, and that lack of ghosting was awesome compared to most LCDs bitd.😁 If I had to guess about the retro future of these units, likely modern LCD swaps like most handheld game consoles have had to do. Quite the sound capability, that's what I remember from the earliest laptops, little to no sound hardware at all. I do find the retroactive matters shown pretty fun, so many rocks unturned like Wolf3D dropping a lot of video card support that people lovingly resurrect. Big fan of the Keen conversions to Composite Artifact Color capability, something I think could have been exploited more heavily in the 80s.🙂
20:48 - DOS 6.22 *can* format natively bigger drives/partitions than about 500MB. It's the bios limiting the size to around 500MHz. DOS 6.22 is limited by FAT16, which is 2GB *per partition* limitation. You can have 8GB drive with 4x2GB partitions with DOS 6.22, if you wish.
This does not appear to be the case with the SD card to IDE adapter that I use in most of my pre-XP systems. 500MB is the most DOS 6.22 wants to recognize.
@@PixelPipes The 500MB thing is purely on bios and the way how C-H-S numbers are held in memory for addressing blocks of disk space. Only thing close to DOS being a limit is some older MS-DOS 3 or 2, that had 32MB limit. I daily run my 386DX40 with MR-BIOS and 4GB CF card running MS-DOS 6.22. Because of 2GB partition limit on FAT16, i have 2 partitions, of course.
The line in the display problem may just be ribbon cable issues. Some can be fixed by just reflowing the solder on the cable ends, it may be worth a shot. This issue is common on gameboys with the fix almost always being this.
This video is exactly what I needed to see! I have an old Compaq Portable 3 286, and I've been trying to figure out how to get files onto it since forever. Is there any chance I could trouble you for a copy of your HD config? I could load that onto an SD and have an absolutely incredible retro machine ready to go.
Yeah, I definitely think 4 shades of grey (or 4 shades of neon red-orange) CGA looks better than the colourful kind. Composite CGA, or hacky high-colour CGA, is a different matter. But the base colours are eye-searing, no matter which way you use them. (Except for Wolfenstein's swapping to greys and almost entirely using grey, I suppose. Does that count as basic-ass hacky high-colour CGA?) That's a nice boot menu as well.
While the 5150 is certainly more historically important than the Tandy 1000, the Tandy is a much better early DOS PC to have in your collection. It doesn't have the problem of newer PCs that won't boot the disks or are too fast and need a slowdown utility which are a royal pain. The Tandy 1000, at least most of the models will play CGA 8088 games just fine. They also allow you to play TGA games, though I do think most games that support TGA will also support EGA and pretty much all VGA cards have backwards compatibility with EGA. Though you will still miss out on the sound and have the speed problems.
The Geoworks thing just goes to show that what is the best thing doesn't always become the winner. The standard. Geoworks was obviously so far superior to Windows in features and design of the GUI yet it died and we got stuck with Microshaft. Thank god for Linux because I couldn't imagine having to use Windows every day. It's 2024 and Windows still doesn't even have a unified interface. I have a Win11 machine for games that don't run on Linux (which isn't many nowadays) and I'm in dark mode. I'm still dumbfounded by the fact that some programs still open with a bright white window background no matter the setting. And you can only customize the accent colors and not the entire UI. you only get to choose light or dark. Even Windows 9x allowed more customization. I miss the good old days where in Win98 and ME you could even design your own custom window backgrounds and interface elements with HTML for each individual window. Now windows is just spyware.
Nice! I got really ADHD’d out during this and lost focus. Do you have the full 6MB RAM in this machine? ISA graphics, Ethernet would be interesting for sure for use with Microweb. Now just need a CZcams video downloader and converter to CGA with MIDI audio haha.
i have 2 of the portable 1's one has a hard drive whereas the other has 2 5 1/4th floppy drives.....one didnt power on and the other did what yours did with a pop.
Greetz from the UK.Loved your video.I have 2 of these a 386 and a 286 both mechanically restored but cant help being envious that you have the memory expansion module in your 286 (those are rare)..sadly mine is just base 640k but has been modified to use a CF card as a hard drive...and the floppy changed from 1.2 to 1.44.I do have a backpack expansion unit..which I can use on either...any chance I could get a image of your 512mb menu driven HD to experiment with ?
@@PixelPipes btw if you search vogons for topic 46&t=62482 there is useful info about using a flashed XTIDE bios directly in the 2 unused mainboard sockets to integrate a modified XTIDE bios in the compaq...I have successfully done this.
Are the gas plasma displays on early portable machines essentially just monochrome versions of color plasma TVs? Reason I ask is, nearly everyone seems to call the monochrome displays _gas_ plasma, whilst color TVs are simply called plasma displays. Is there any difference in how they work (other than the RGB subpixels present in a color display)?
Gas plasmas are just plasma displays with indigestion. I actually don't know the technical differences between them and newer plasmas. Would be interesting to find out!
It is the complete Steamboat Willie short as an XDV file. You will need Jim Leonard's XDC player program. github.com/MobyGamer/XDC And the XDV file here. archive.org/details/steamboat_willie_xdc
Yes Wolf3d on My 286 Toshiba Plasma Laptop is very Similar, slower but clear, SHARP maybe needs a repair I did own 1 of those, sorry I sold it .. If you want the Game to TEST a 286/386 = ANCIENT ART OF WAR
Wait....that last bit.....after demonstrating all those games and apps and operating systems....after using in for almost every day while making this video.....are you telling us it died?
So some of you that watched til the end might have seen a sad farewell message mourning the death of the machine. Well you'll be happy (or indifferent) to know that after some new caps, she lives again! 😄
Nice surprise seeing something retro, well done!
on a channel that does retro videos?
@@RWL2012 well, it is 80s retro while the rest is 90s retro... that's the most charitable explanation I can think of ;)
@@kaitlyn__Lno most stuff is 2000's
@@candle86 the Voodoo cards weren’t late 90s? Okay. If you say so
@@kaitlyn__L your ability to read is questionable, most stuff he does is from the 2000's, he has a handful of older videos only a handful. Maybe try reading comprehension before you comment?
That cable coiling trick is really useful to know!
4:53 I bought a Compaq Luggable for school in the early 90s used for $99. It was literally the cheapest DOS computer for sale in Philadelphia. The computer store was in downtown Philadelphia, right in the center city district. I parked like 10 blocks away to get cheaper parking (I was shopping, but I didn't know I was going to buy anything) and so I had to carry that thing for like those 10 blocks. It is both heavy and fragile. The worst combination., The salesman was really cool and he was like, "you're a starving student? I got just what you need" It was loaded with software too, so I didn't have to buy any software.
Seeing a DOScember video published in mid January.. that's my kind of CZcamsr. Insta-sub!
Great work with the montage, the restauration, you needed to be quite resilient to get another machine and finally get things the way you wanted. I love everything about this machine, these luggable systems were something I would dream about while paging PC magazines back in the day. Congrats on another video.
Thank you Sucra!
Amazing video. Best compaq review and setup I've seen until now. Gave me a couple of ideas for my Portable 386. Subscribed!
Love that plasma display! Wow! Commander Keen looks so good on that!
IMO: a 286 is pretty much the minimum for a usable PC experience. I've never been able to get into the older 8086 and 8088 machines; they're just too darn slow.
Also, I agree: GEOS on these older PCs is a breath of fresh air. I first discovered it as the "shell" around America Online for DOS back on my 486 SX/33.
Also also: You mention it taking some getting used to, but here's how messed up I am: I love the AT keyboard layout so much (also similar: Apple IIe / IIc / IIgs layout) that I remap all of my modern machines to put the Ctrl / Cmd key in the place of Caps Lock.
Great video! Love to see a Pixel Pipes vid on my timeline again!
Thank you, thank you! Oh wooow yeah I can't imagine using the AT layout full-time, but I will admit I was surprised how quickly I was able to adapt.
Happy late DOScember! And as always, it is awesome to see a new video!
More often than not the driver chips are still fine on gas plasmas. What ive found its the connections around the screen itself you need to heat them up and that seems to fix them.
Good to see a new clip from you 🎉 loved the portable 3 back in the day. Would prop up the unit on the family coffee table and have the keyboard on my lap. Spent hours programming and writing notes… and maybe a bit of sim city/leaderboard golf
Killer montage! I'm new to yr channel. Thanks for sharing this awesome machine!
It is so nice to see your return.
I have 2x of these Portable 3's. One of them has vertical lines on it but otherwise boots and works fine. I was thinking I could reflow the solder, but it sounds like it might be the chips themselves. The other one went BANG when being tested by a friend. I think it was a bad tant, I wasn't there so not sure. I've not had time to go into them yet. Both need new keyboard cables. I was DREADING figuring out how to replace the spinning rust of a HDD inside, so I was very pleased to see that you can use a cheapo SD/IDE. Absolutely great video, so glad you are still out there in the hobby and making content too! Cheers!
Happy new year! Good to see you still kicking about!
Oh nooo!!! Did it died??? I'm in the process of rebuilding one. I gave mine away in 2005 or so and had regrets soon after. ShuttleTech had an external ~500MB hard drive back in the 90s that connected via the parallel port and was powered by a Y-splitter for the keyboard cord. Back in 1999 I had Windows 3.11 on mine and was writing my thesis on it using Word. I publish regularly now and am hoping to get my new one recovered so I can get back to writing again with it. I agree.. it's a glorious system and very fun to work on - when it's working!!
Glad your back!
I scored one of these years ago, trouble was it sucked heaps of power and all but acts as a hair dryer, heat wise. So I passed it off to a fellow worker wanting to use it as a terminal on a PDP11 or something similar.
Great vid, I definitely love seeing these beauties get a new lease on life. Also really love your menu system and the very involved demo. Glad my keyboard repair vid could be of assistance, too!
Yeah man your series was great! Helped a lot. Now the machine stopped posting so I may have to rewatch some of your videos to see what's what. It just has a blinking cursor and won't count the RAM.
That tantalum is a simple fix, so it may be worth passing it on. I would like to round up a Portable 3 as well.
We used one of these with a CD-ROM on the back.
Excellent video. As a field service technician, I lugged a 386 version of this to customer sites. It ran some proprietary software, and was also used to run an EPROM programmer.
Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth haha
@@SuperNoticer Pretty much 😀
@@Colin_Ames Haha just joking around bro thanks for being a good sport
Nice to see you back from your hiatus, love your winxp gpu vids and enjoy see you spread out your content!
Long time no see, and your one of my favorite tech youtubers, not to mention Mr Phil.
Also in your games menu I love the Wargames referance. "Shall we play a game?" Do i get a prize? lol j/k
You are indeed the first to notice! Thank you for the kind words as well :)
DOS 6.22 can format up to 2GB Partitions (limit of FAT-16) and handle drives up to 8GB (limit of Interrupt 0x13). Most likely the limits you encountered were the result of the system's BIOS having the ~500MB Limitation, which is typically the result of trying to save space in things like the CMOS RAM by only using 4 bits for the heads and thus limiting the number of heads at a maximum of 16. (1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors per track, 512 byte sectors = 504MiB. (528MB if using decimal).
Probably
2:00 Oh a popped tantalum! Had the same thing happen on the CGA card of my Portable II, but I also had the camera rolling and the shell off so I saw the explosion live 😂
It's funny how the brain sees the red on the playing cards in GEOS, and blue on the headers in Windows. Excellent upgrades!
happy to see a new video!
My childhood Tandy had a 3 button mouse. Well done! Retro show and tell #doscember all year
Glorious machine!!!
For 3D printers: many libraries have a makerlab you can access to get help with 3d printing for cost of materials or close to it. Might be worth looking into if you're near a city and want to get a better drive cage going.
I'm in to plasma-stuff too 😎 I have Toshiba T3200, T3200SX and T5200. That T5200 is actually pimped a litte: Ti486SXL2/40 with cache flush circuit, DIY 40pin SIMMs so 12MB RAM, 10GB HDD, modified BIOS with support for the CPU and included XTIDE. ISA-slots are filled with 3COM 509 and Gravis Ultrasound MAX. This thing is mostly used to play tracker music at retrolanparties 🤓 It runs FastDoom quite well too. And all this with plasma-glory...
It sounds like a beast!
It wont run Crysis but Second Reality instead 😅 czcams.com/video/sFz-ixKPYWI/video.html
i used to have a portable that made the same squeaky noises, i had to replace all of the orange tantalums on the motherboard to get it going, then few weeks later another one blew inside the psu near a heat sink with a scary cloud of smoke, i replaced it also and that made the machine work again
What I did with my Portable 3 is I just left it set to Type 17 formatted a 530mb conner I had laying around in another machine installed dos and games on it and plopped it into my portable 3 and it boots and is able to use the full formatted size of the drive.
You're lucky to have a working Conner drive
Dos 6.22 can even format up to 2G FAT 16 partition. And it can access up to 2 partitions (one primary and one extended with many logical volumes, the total sum of all of them being max 8G). Natively.
Dos 5 the same.
That only if the BIOS is able to recognize the capacity of the HDD, as some old BIOS had a 526M limit. To overcome that limitation, can use a Disk Manager software (from Ontrack, Seagate) that install a Dynamic Disk Overlay, to patch the BIOS at boot, in the MBR.
the longer you are gone, the bigger chunk to chew you come back with. Thank you regardless for the videos.
I’ve had great success with Mercari when it comes to vintage machines (though admittedly not as much lately, especially after they raised their shipping rates multiple times). Got a 5150 for $70 shipped with a model M, a nice P3 machine, a TAM (which I actually bought from their UI guy) and a bunch of Apple II stuff all from there at great prices.
The shipping rates when the app first appeared in the US were incredibly good. They had to been losing their shirt subsidizing them.
Glad to see new content. BTW, Halt and Catch Fire really is good TV and worth a watch.
Not only was the original the most-compatible clone at the time, it was more-compatible than some of IBM's own sequel machines! (Or so said the Compaq founders in a documentary about the company.)
Wow, you're back! Happy new year 2024, that's a pretty chunk length of the video to be honest! ❤
Always excited for Pixel Pipes. And a DOS video?! Oh my
I love to see a Pixel Pipes video in my feed!
Fun run through, a very nice machine for the era if you could afford it heh. Some really nice and easy to use interface software, like a DOS front end heh.
Shame about the display problems, even if the chips had some kind of modern replacement option the screen itself will eventually quit. I do think they're worth running as long as you are able to since I don't think we'll see gas plasma ever again. Yeah so bright, sharp, and that lack of ghosting was awesome compared to most LCDs bitd.😁 If I had to guess about the retro future of these units, likely modern LCD swaps like most handheld game consoles have had to do.
Quite the sound capability, that's what I remember from the earliest laptops, little to no sound hardware at all. I do find the retroactive matters shown pretty fun, so many rocks unturned like Wolf3D dropping a lot of video card support that people lovingly resurrect. Big fan of the Keen conversions to Composite Artifact Color capability, something I think could have been exploited more heavily in the 80s.🙂
20:48 - DOS 6.22 *can* format natively bigger drives/partitions than about 500MB. It's the bios limiting the size to around 500MHz. DOS 6.22 is limited by FAT16, which is 2GB *per partition* limitation. You can have 8GB drive with 4x2GB partitions with DOS 6.22, if you wish.
This does not appear to be the case with the SD card to IDE adapter that I use in most of my pre-XP systems. 500MB is the most DOS 6.22 wants to recognize.
@@PixelPipes The 500MB thing is purely on bios and the way how C-H-S numbers are held in memory for addressing blocks of disk space. Only thing close to DOS being a limit is some older MS-DOS 3 or 2, that had 32MB limit.
I daily run my 386DX40 with MR-BIOS and 4GB CF card running MS-DOS 6.22. Because of 2GB partition limit on FAT16, i have 2 partitions, of course.
The line in the display problem may just be ribbon cable issues. Some can be fixed by just reflowing the solder on the cable ends, it may be worth a shot. This issue is common on gameboys with the fix almost always being this.
Very nice config!
This video is exactly what I needed to see! I have an old Compaq Portable 3 286, and I've been trying to figure out how to get files onto it since forever. Is there any chance I could trouble you for a copy of your HD config? I could load that onto an SD and have an absolutely incredible retro machine ready to go.
Yeah, I definitely think 4 shades of grey (or 4 shades of neon red-orange) CGA looks better than the colourful kind. Composite CGA, or hacky high-colour CGA, is a different matter. But the base colours are eye-searing, no matter which way you use them. (Except for Wolfenstein's swapping to greys and almost entirely using grey, I suppose. Does that count as basic-ass hacky high-colour CGA?)
That's a nice boot menu as well.
While the 5150 is certainly more historically important than the Tandy 1000, the Tandy is a much better early DOS PC to have in your collection. It doesn't have the problem of newer PCs that won't boot the disks or are too fast and need a slowdown utility which are a royal pain. The Tandy 1000, at least most of the models will play CGA 8088 games just fine. They also allow you to play TGA games, though I do think most games that support TGA will also support EGA and pretty much all VGA cards have backwards compatibility with EGA. Though you will still miss out on the sound and have the speed problems.
We have one of these 386s for sale.
The Geoworks thing just goes to show that what is the best thing doesn't always become the winner. The standard. Geoworks was obviously so far superior to Windows in features and design of the GUI yet it died and we got stuck with Microshaft. Thank god for Linux because I couldn't imagine having to use Windows every day. It's 2024 and Windows still doesn't even have a unified interface. I have a Win11 machine for games that don't run on Linux (which isn't many nowadays) and I'm in dark mode. I'm still dumbfounded by the fact that some programs still open with a bright white window background no matter the setting. And you can only customize the accent colors and not the entire UI. you only get to choose light or dark. Even Windows 9x allowed more customization. I miss the good old days where in Win98 and ME you could even design your own custom window backgrounds and interface elements with HTML for each individual window. Now windows is just spyware.
How come everyone finds all these amazing things at garage sales but when I go all they have is old clothes, dishes, and furniture?
Nice! I got really ADHD’d out during this and lost focus. Do you have the full 6MB RAM in this machine? ISA graphics, Ethernet would be interesting for sure for use with Microweb. Now just need a CZcams video downloader and converter to CGA with MIDI audio haha.
i have 2 of the portable 1's one has a hard drive whereas the other has 2 5 1/4th floppy drives.....one didnt power on and the other did what yours did with a pop.
Greetz from the UK.Loved your video.I have 2 of these a 386 and a 286 both mechanically restored but cant help being envious that you have the memory expansion module in your 286 (those are rare)..sadly mine is just base 640k but has been modified to use a CF card as a hard drive...and the floppy changed from 1.2 to 1.44.I do have a backpack expansion unit..which I can use on either...any chance I could get a image of your 512mb menu driven HD to experiment with ?
I was actually thinking about posting a pinned comment with an image of the drive (maybe sans games for legal reasons), so that might happen.
@@PixelPipes btw if you search vogons for topic 46&t=62482 there is useful info about using a flashed XTIDE bios directly in the 2 unused mainboard sockets to integrate a modified XTIDE bios in the compaq...I have successfully done this.
i have 6 of the hardcards from 20mb up to 80mb for the hardcard 2
Are the gas plasma displays on early portable machines essentially just monochrome versions of color plasma TVs? Reason I ask is, nearly everyone seems to call the monochrome displays _gas_ plasma, whilst color TVs are simply called plasma displays. Is there any difference in how they work (other than the RGB subpixels present in a color display)?
Gas plasmas are just plasma displays with indigestion.
I actually don't know the technical differences between them and newer plasmas. Would be interesting to find out!
Hey man what's the animation playing at the end? Also I really gotta try Microweb on my T5200 😀
It is the complete Steamboat Willie short as an XDV file. You will need Jim Leonard's XDC player program.
github.com/MobyGamer/XDC
And the XDV file here.
archive.org/details/steamboat_willie_xdc
Kaypro CPM machines predated this and were the model for the luggable.
Ywhats next an Amiga video, pre and post AGA maybe???
Geoworks was really far ahead of its time
Would it be possible to replace the gas plasma display with some sort of LCD display?
I have one and have used it , it is not as functional for me nowdays as a "normal" laptop due to screen size and so on
Why don't you replace with the modern TFT?
I'd only do that as a last resort. The orange glow of the screen is a big part of the vintage appeal for me.
Yes Wolf3d on My 286 Toshiba Plasma Laptop is very Similar, slower but clear, SHARP maybe needs a repair I did own 1 of those, sorry I sold it .. If you want the Game to TEST a 286/386 = ANCIENT ART OF WAR
Those compaq "portables" are fickle beasts. I have one but it doesn't work.
Yep. There's a lot that goes wrong on them.
Not chance of dual monitor ??
Wait....that last bit.....after demonstrating all those games and apps and operating systems....after using in for almost every day while making this video.....are you telling us it died?
Yep just suddenly stopped posting. I have the tear the whole thing down and maybe do a full recap. But god knows what it could be
Discord link does not work
Really? I just gave it a test and it's fine
ok fine... BUT... does it run DOOM ⁉😎
Not.... yet
Moist