I bought a brand new 386 dx 33 back in the day, I felt like a kid at the chocolate factory in that smokey computer shop; price lists everywhere, floppy drives and floppies stacked in a complete mad-scientist looking shop. It was a mess. I thought "these are my people".
The title is a bit misleading; it's running on an 8088-compatible CPU, and a 1 megabyte SRAM, with the FPGA containing the display adapter and drive controller, as well as the glue logic.
Honestly? I expected this to be talking about the MiSTer project FPGA core[1]. That has been tuned so it's capable of running the AREA5150 demo[2] which is an insane challenge (AFAIK the timings of the v20 break that demo). Not saying this isn't cool, but it's definitely not what I was expecting.
I love the hard drive sound emulation! I find that modern restorations of vintage hardware using SD cards to emulate drives are missing an important part of the nostalgic experience when they just start up completely silently.
The attention the author paid to these little details really raises this project above the typical (XT) hardware clone. Put another way: I absolutely love this feature.
Yeah, for me there's something about the sound of the power supply, CPU and (sometimes) graphics card fans, coupled with the ticking of an old school hard disk that takes me right back to the nineties.
I know spinning disks were a thing for a lot longer than that, and were still pretty commonly used up into the 2010s, but they were in general much quieter than hard drives from the 90s.
What was the most surprising timing constraint you had to meet for the V20 bus controller? The 8088's multiclock cycles were always under specified in original datasheets and I'm curious what reality looked like.
A bit offtopic for this article , but I'm waiting for some FPGA's based "..device PC emulator?..." that can connect to my old hard drives from the mid 80s ... and boot them ....
There is 32MB of SDRAM on the FPGA board.... I wonder exactly what using 1MB of that as the system memory would have entailed instead of the separate 1MB SRAM chip that had to be soldered. Was using the extra SRAM chip just done just to do it, or is there a specific reason there that I'm not seeing/understanding...
I would like to have a xt and at and 386 in this tiny form factor, to play Rogue on the X T and try to compile nethack on the 286 version of Xenix and the 386 version of Xenix. I know from experience it will never compile on the 8088 version of Xenix. It will wreck your OS and filesystem.
This is exactly the type of content I come to HN for. Succinctly writen passion project posts like this one that actually inspire me to finish and document my own.
I started a (couple of) very similar project(s) for the VCS/2600 that I'm now motivated to take a second look at. One that used a modern 6502 equivalent, and another that was largely software based, but read and used the physical cartridges and controllers but passed the heavy lifting to software emulation.
That said, I do hope the author posts a follow-up on how the EGA graphics were implemented.
I love this, but I do prefer just using the NuXT. The NEC V20 is a great CPU, my personal favorite. It's a better 8088 that maintains compatibility while increasing performance and offered a great price to consumers at the time of its introduction.
I've a NEC V30 sitting somewhere on a bookshelf, and I was thinking of building an emulated chipset around it to emulate an Amstrad PC1512/PC1640, but with HDMI output. Or maybe DisplayPort since that's not encumbered with patents or royalties. I have an Amstrad PC1640 working perfectly in PCem on Linux. But it'd be more satisfying to actually build something that would make use of the NEC V30.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 56.3 ms ] threadOne of the best days of my life.
[1] https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/PCXT_MiSTer
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOmcgp99fEk
I know spinning disks were a thing for a lot longer than that, and were still pretty commonly used up into the 2010s, but they were in general much quieter than hard drives from the 90s.
I started a (couple of) very similar project(s) for the VCS/2600 that I'm now motivated to take a second look at. One that used a modern 6502 equivalent, and another that was largely software based, but read and used the physical cartridges and controllers but passed the heavy lifting to software emulation.
That said, I do hope the author posts a follow-up on how the EGA graphics were implemented.