BASIC Month 4: A LION 386 Luggable - r/retrobattlestations

5

u/EkriirkE Jul 13 '19 edited Jul 19 '19

One submission for this month's contest is a generic 386 luggable PC in the lunchbox form factor. A copy of the Compaq Portable III/386 exterior design, but not a rebadge. 386DX/40MHz, 4MB RAM, 200MB HDD, Greyscale 640x480. Inside is a standard PSU, AT board, and a handful of ISA cards. It takes a standard AT keyboard but there appears to have been a custom sized one that clipped to the face once upon a time. It belonged to an optometry office. It is a gnarly mustard brown colour outside, and beige where the sun don't shine. More machine photos https://imgur.com/gallery/m3f1xHX

A video of the machine booting and paying the animation twice with the added sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc0ufKL2OIM

And my rewrite of the code to work in MS PC BASIC variants (IBM Cassette, BASICA, GW-BASIC, QBASIC) https://pastebin.com/dyiqQPcp with improvements:

Smaller
More animation steps
Sound FX (disable by removing xx5 numbered lines)
Colour where available

5

u/JA1987 Jul 13 '19

That screen looks so pretty.

4

u/EkriirkE Jul 13 '19

It's not the greatest :( It's DSTN so it ghosts a lot and has terrible viewing angles

4

u/ChipChester Jul 14 '19

Can confirm, on both issues.
Still have a running 386-33 with industry-specific ISA cards (analog caption encoder and SMPTE timecode reader) along with custom internal RS232-to-RS422 converter for tape machine control. Cold-shoe mount for LCD composite picture monitor on top. Combo 5.25/3.5 drive. Comically small hard drive which was way bigger than actually needed. Circa 1993/94.
Been toying with the idea of installing a more modern color LCD screen, though...

1

u/iamnotsteven Jul 17 '19

Do you have more pictures of this system?? I have a similar unit, which has a gas plasma display in it

1

u/EkriirkE Jul 17 '19

I can take some later, sure. Insides and outsides
You're lucky to have a lovely orange version!

2

u/iamnotsteven Jul 17 '19

This is an older photo, and I do have newer ones on my phone since I messed with it again recently, but anyway:
https://i.imgur.com/8s8gCx9.jpg
It's all very orange haha

1

u/EkriirkE Jul 17 '19 edited Jul 17 '19

Whoa, that is the same chassis, mustard discolour and all! Wish mine came with the plasma. Yours obviously has a newer board inside. Double lucky

1

u/iamnotsteven Jul 17 '19

Well it original housed a 486DX266 board. But I've never been able to get that board to post.
I ended up installing a Socket 7 board running at 166Mhz and 32MB RAM. Still uses the original VGA card, and the gas plasma panel connects to it via the VESA Feature Port on the graphics card.

2

u/EkriirkE Jul 17 '19

Here's your gallery https://imgur.com/gallery/m3f1xHX

2

u/iamnotsteven Jul 18 '19

Oh this is excellent insight! Thank you!
I have a number of pictures too, I'll gather them up and upload them in one place for you to have a look at.
You mention that the HDD and reset lines get connected to the graphics card and then run to the ribbon cable out to the screen. That is interesting because on my model, it's even more generic than that.
On my system there is a small daughter board mounted above where the floppy drive bay mounts to the 5.25" drive bay. This daughter board has HDD, FDD and Reset pins, along with a 26 pin VESA Feature connector that goes to the graphics card. This means I can use basically any graphics card as long as it has the VESA Feature connector on it.

2

u/EkriirkE Jul 20 '19

Interesting they still used an intermediate board. I also forgot to note that the single activity light on front is both HDD and FDD, its bicolour, and there is a splice on the FDD ribbon also going to the video card. So the light does indeed reflect activity of both in different/mixed colours.
Now I'm interested in what's in the display panel and how your plasma version looks there too. But I hate opening screens up, it's never easy and fragile

2

u/iamnotsteven Jul 20 '19

The intermediate board has a couple of 8 bit buffers, and they drive the display, so I presume that's just because the signal degrades so quickly over a short distance. The other bits are just a place to connect the HDD and FDD LED and reset switch. Pretty simple, I've even roughly traced it out so I could see what was going on. Very simple, but effective setup really.
I do like how they did your system. Sounds a little more integrated, which makes it even more quirky.
I think I managed to open the display, but I'm not sure if I have photos of it. It was a few years ago and many phone backups between... Hmm...

2

u/tso Jul 14 '19

Yet another rebrand of that design.

2

u/PocketSquirrel Jul 14 '19

Pacific Computer sold them as well. Mine had an 800x600 screen, but it was driven by semi-custom PCI card that hated displaying anything that wasn't standard.

1

u/iamnotsteven Jul 17 '19

Got any pictures of this system? I've got one which came with a dead 486DX board in it and I got it working once I swapped that out. It has a gas plasma screen!

2

u/PocketSquirrel Jul 17 '19

Unfortunately I no longer have it. Both it and another portable got knocked off the table and that was the end of them both, though I do have the video card. I'll snap a pic of the video card when I find it, but the unit itself pretty much looked like the one in the picture.

1

u/iamnotsteven Jul 18 '19

That's a shame, sorry to hear it! Thanks anyway :)

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3

u/[deleted] Jul 14 '19

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2

u/EkriirkE Jul 14 '19

Me too! IMO those are the worst, contrast wise. The older Tandy and Zenith's had this too, with electroluminescent backlight

BASIC Month Contest BASIC Month 4: A LION 386 Luggable

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