Epson PC-386 Note A - A Japanese PC-98 Compatible Laptop from 1990

*WIP*

My first experience of PC-9800 (PC-9800シリーズ) hardware, I won this on a popular auction site. After watching it for literally months, it kept being relisted, over and over again. I made an offer on the item and came to an arrangement with the seller who had imported it from Japan to the UK as a project machine, with no time to spend on it. 

The Epson PC-386 Note A, released in 1990:

- i386 16Mhz (switchable between 10Mhz and 6Mhz)

- 640k 0ws RAM

- Display Side-lit FTN type white LCD 640x400 dots 8 levels (switchable to 2 levels)

- Floppy disk (unusual 640k / 1.2m 2 mode)

- 120MB Hard disk

- External expansion connector Expansion bus (with RGB output) 110-pin type

- Sound function Beep sound

Full specs can be found here: https://www.pc-9800.net/db_epson/data/pc-386na.htm

I will be posting my experience and updates on this laptop, restoration and modification. 

First of all, here's the low down:

The PSU is Japanese, I'd need a voltage converter to use UK mains, but quickly discovered, by looking at the I/O shield that it is 10v DC and it even told me the pins that were + and -. I rigged up some Dupont connectors to a variable laptop PSU and it powers on, I was lucky the system posted and the backlight worked, also the screen was mint.

After powering on the laptop it booted into a read-only version MS-DOS Ver 2.11 Japanese FEP, this is a stored on a 1.2MB rom chip. What an awesome feature, so even if the both your harddrive and floppy drive are faulty or missing, you still get a useable operating system.

These EPSON PC-98 compatible machines come with a dos menu system, so when it finishes booting from the rom image, you’re greeted with a nice functional menu (caveat: it’s in Japanese). On a side note, one of the biggest obstacles for myself is that everything is in Japanese, but this is part of the mystery and fun, I’ve just used Google Lens and it works very well indeed.

Details and information on the dos menu system: