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A new little restoration project.
We have computers with 8086, 188, 286, 486, P1, P2 and P3 at home, but we didn't have a 386 machine. I saw a listing of an Amstrad 386 laptop that got me curious: there were photos of a working greyscale LCD, and the seller said they recapped the board, but couldn't quite make it fully work still, so it was sold for cheap as "parts".
On arrival the screen was not working, and the computer insisted that something was wrong. The keyboard was dead, hard drive was dead, and even a poor floppy drive inside was dead. Video card had signs of corrosion. The computer has one ISA slot, and it boots when there's an external video card and a keyboard. The floppy drive cabling isn't standard, but it was easy to mod a spare drive by cutting some tracks and soldering bodge wires. Now we can boot into DOS.
Internal video is going to be an interesting fix. After washing, VGA BIOS seems to be working, but there's no video signal generated. Thankfully there's a schematic, and it's "simple".
@nina_kali_nina we went from 8088 with cga graphics to pentium 90. That was quite the jump! Especially when you consider the new pc had 3 times the size of the 8088 hard drive in RAM.
@oook the colours! The resolution! The media!!!
@nina_kali_nina exactly. For decades I could only browse magazines full of vga games with envy.
Well not totally true as I got Sega Master System then Megadrive consoles. Still the pentium opened the way to making music with trackers, play simulators or games with video cinematics.