So, friends, as y’all may know, I love my Hand 386. It’s become my go-to handheld because I love playing things like Star Fleet II, F-117, Silent Hunter II and more on the go with a physical keyboard.
Now, I know this thing won’t last forever, and with them no longer being available anymore (I’ve not seen one in months), I’ve been thinking about what would happen if and when this thing croaks. I’ve seen a lot of folks recommend the Toshiba Libretto 70CT as a great handheld DOS machine, but these seem to be very difficult to find.
So I figured I’d ask you guys for your suggestions for something pretty small, with a physical keyboard, that could let me play DOS games. Thanks for your time.
Brian, I know you stream so what if you reached out to Aya to demo their AYA NEO Slide model for a test period or something. It’s really new, but is something akin to a Steam Deck with a keyboard. So the questions are around what it runs, and if it would allow you to run something older like a Win95 build or a small VPC running MSDOS or similar. Or, if it runs Windows and you can still make those older titles work without issue, that might solve the problem in an easier way.
The catches here are you probably will NOT get something at that prior price point you had. You could instead just see if you could locate another Hand 386 as a spare. A lot of these new small platforms are more like the Steam Deck, sans any keyboard at all, and I’ve not seen a good clip-on option that would make any of them semi-okay as a keyboard only gaming platform. The Aya Neo stood out, but there might be another one out there as well.
Almost forgot, you might want to keep your eye on that aggregation site as well:
