vga256 on Nostr: aaaaaaaaa i can't believe it five years ago i picked up this tiny NEC MobilePro ...

aaaaaaaaa i can't believe it

five years ago i picked up this tiny NEC MobilePro palmtop locally. when i brought it home, it booted once, complained about the battery, and then went completely dead. no lights, no response to electrical stimuli. nothing.

i was heartbroken, and it went into my repair closet of doom.

tonight i pulled it out, completely forgetting that it was dead. i plugged it in, and was disappointed to remember that it was a deader.

on a hunch, i pulled out a multimeter and poked around the ac adapter plug. it was outputting 0.2v. it's supposed to output 9v (!)

i found an adapter with matching polarity and voltage (which turns out to be a Sega Game Gear ac adapter), and plugged it in - and to my delight, the machine instantly booted and started charging.

i've never used windows 2000 PocketPC before, and i'm surprised at how delightfully straightforward it is.

it runs in 640x240 in 16-bit colour, which is surprisingly spacious on an 8-inch screen. best of all, it has an *excellent* keyboard and an internal 56k v.90 modem (!!)

i popped open the CF slot, and found a nice 6GB compactflash drive inside. not a CF card, but actual 1-inch spinning seagate rust (the same thing as an IBM microdrive you'd find in an ipod).

excited to get this thing online via the internal modem soon. does anyone else have one of these?

#pocketpc #handheld #retrocomputing