Hardware: Book 8088

[@matthewlister3755]

I bought this thing for one reason and one reason only: Making chiptunes. The OPL3 was too hard to pass up. I got a PICOGus coming for everything else. I got the USB drive to work with the original trash driver by creating a bootable MS-DOS USB with Rufus. Thank you, whoever wrote Rufus. If I ever get another machine with an Arduino CH375 it's good to know that Rufus exists.

[@Yokokomoe]

I got a Book 8088 to play Kings Quest 4. but still waiting on it to arrive!

[@cyningstan]

Great video! I have the CGA version of the machine. I bought it because it's the exact spec of machine that I develop games for, and I can't afford an IBM PC at the prices they go for nowadays. I didn't have any major problems with mine. I couldn't find the on off button in the packaging, so I have to poke a pencil or something in the hole to switch it on. But it did come with the OPL sound board when I only ordered (and paid for) the internal speaker version.

[@sparcie]

I'm pretty much in the same boat, the prices of PC and PC clones here are pretty crazy and there are not all that many of them available despite how common they were. I also don't have enough room to really store more vintage machines. I have done some reading and the V1 with CGA is pretty darn close to the original PC spec wise, if you have an 8088 instead of a NEC V20 the only difference ends up being the SRAM not requiring refresh cycles. If you want exact timing equivalence you can write a TSR (might be one already existing) that turns on refresh (via DMA) and makes the V1 close enough to the original PC that it will run timing sensitive demos such as Area5150 and 8088MPH. Mine being an NEC V20 and with VGA obvious can't do that, but it's close enough for my purposes.

[@conradtrout]

Very helpful video. Thanks! Without proper CGA I think I'll buy the Pocket 386 instead.

[@sparcie]

I've been looking at getting one of those myself, just I don't need a 386 so much as I have vintage hardware in that performance range. That being said I think the pocket 386 looks like a good buy, it's certainly better for most DOS games than the Book 8088 is.

[@MontieMongoose]

Sounds like this version is improved.

[@RetroTechChris]

Yea, the FreddyV USB driver is awesome! I guess you could also take the CF card and connect it to a modern PC too! I recently got a Pocket 386, which is pretty awesome. Added a PicoGUS Femto edition to it, and now I have wireless (granted, I don't know if new PicoGUS Femtos will have a Pi Pico on them, so may not work, not sure! I should ask Ian, LOL)

[@sparcie]

The only thing I've found you have to be careful of is modern operating systems sometimes ruining the CF cards ability to boot DOS. I had trouble with that recently and it was a headache. The Pocket 386 looks pretty cool as well, I might get one when I have some cash. Adding wireless to it sounds interesting. Is it like the wireless to RS232 devices or does it look like a network card to DOS?

[@quincy1048]

@@sparcie I wonder if the modern operating system ruaining the cf card had to do wiht the fat32/fat16 miss match...I have a pocket386 my dos 6.22 image is fat16 and i was able to get the supplied usb driver to work with a usb stick but only if I went fat16...my windows 95 image is fat32. I doubt dos would read my windows 95 image files at all. other wise having fun with my pocket386...I came across a debian 2.2 image going to mess around with. I hear good things aobu tthe 8086 version of there device.

[@sparcie]

There were a few different ways it could ruin the boot. By modern OS I meant something more like windows 7 or 10, which seem to mess with the fat and boot record sometimes. I'm not sure how or why, but it happened to me. It seems some OS's will write an MBR that only supports a 386 or better, so it's important to use an MS-DOS tool to format/fix the compact flash if you're installing a new OS (or fixing a non-booting card) that is if you want it to work on an 8088 like this one. Somehow the MBR on my card got clobbered. You're also correct that this machine won't read fat32, being a 16bit CPU and DOS but it wasn't the cause of my problems.

[@aleph_one]

laptop not bad, it is terrible.