[HN Gopher] Connecting an 8086 or 8088 processor to a Raspberry Pi
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Connecting an 8086 or 8088 processor to a Raspberry Pi
Author : tadbit
Score : 63 points
Date : 2022-05-20 14:55 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.homebrew8088.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.homebrew8088.com)
| phaedrus wrote:
| I did a similar thing with a 6502 and the Propeller
| microcontroller. I always meant to make an 8086 or 8088 version,
| but moved on to other things before ever doing so.
|
| Dangerous Prototypes wrote up a pretty good post about it:
| http://dangerousprototypes.com/blog/2012/02/22/prop-6502-pro...
| redundantly wrote:
| The Parallax page they link to is gone, archive.org doesn't
| have any of the pictures/videos of it.
|
| Do you happen to still have this information somewhere?
| phaedrus wrote:
| There's more pictures and info on my old blog:
|
| http://dennisferron.blogspot.com/2008/12/prop6502-laptop-
| pro...
|
| Looks like Parallax still has a link to their old site, but I
| couldn't find the contest pages there, either.
|
| https://www1.parallax.com/
|
| I'm pretty sure the code I wrote for it ended up on the
| Propeller object exchange, but _that_ site also is gone... It
| probably lives on in the migration to a github repo, but it
| isn 't so easy to search by author AFAICT.
|
| http://obex.parallax.com/
|
| My picture (along with the other design contest winners and
| honorable mentions) was on the back of the May 2009 Nuts and
| Volts magazine, but I just checked my copy and there's no
| article inside, just the blurb on the back cover.
| tadbit wrote:
| Thank you!
| morpheos137 wrote:
| shouldn't this be trivially simple with an rs232 to usb adapter?
| trollied wrote:
| Reminds me of the project that used a Raspberry Pi running a
| software emulator as an Amiga CPU - Pi plugged into the CPU
| socket via an adapter board. Probably the most impressive project
| I've ever seen. https://www.hackster.io/news/hands-on-with-the-
| pistorm-the-u...
| reaperducer wrote:
| Lots of interesting drop-in chip replacements in the retro
| computing world these days.
|
| Two I can think of off the top of my head:
|
| - FPGA 6581 to replace a Commodore 64 SID chip.
|
| - There's a drop-in sorta Z-80 so you can run CP/M on the
| TRS-80 Model 100.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| I wonder if we might see drop in replacements used in other
| tech from the past that might be end of life or near to,
| especially space satellites where power supplies permit.
| sigstoat wrote:
| space hardware doesn't involve a lot of socketed parts.
|
| and end of life usually means battery or mechanical
| failures, not "the electronics need an upgrade"
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| There's a similar project for the Acorn BBC Micro called
| PiTubeDirect, which allows the Pi to emulate several different
| CPUs, while connected to the BBC Micro's "tube" second
| processor slot.
|
| https://github.com/hoglet67/PiTubeDirect
|
| (The BBC Micro itself was quite remarkable for supporting
| multiple processors, which did not have to be the same
| architecture as the host 6502. Amazing for 1981.)
| metadat wrote:
| This seems worthy of its own HN submission, so I did it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31449828
| tpmx wrote:
| Love the simple/elegant/powerful idea of driving the CPU clock
| from code running on RPI/Linux. It sidesteps the difficulty of
| efficiently doing bitbanging on RPI/Linux in a neat way.
| jesuslop wrote:
| The idea is fantastic. It would make a great computer
| architecture lab asignment.
| tpmx wrote:
| Yeah, you get a way of easily doing a GUI via HDMI or X over
| IP or whatever, much easier development for most people and
| lose some performance you don't really care about anyway in
| that situation.
| wila wrote:
| Had to search for the PCB. Looks like this is the one:
|
| https://www.ebay.com/sch/emil6190/m.html
| tadbit wrote:
| Correct! I recently ordered the 8086 version (the first CPU I
| used as a child) so I could play around with it.
| dboreham wrote:
| Confused as to why this is a useful exercise vs emulating the
| 8086 on the Pi?
| [deleted]
| synu wrote:
| Perhaps it's more to see if they can, or for fun, than strictly
| for some useful purpose.
| VLM wrote:
| This is a sort-deep link to one page of the site and the main
| page of the site explains the overall project to design and
| build one's own XT-clone. Kind of ambitious.
|
| So start with a Pi running around 1/30th normal speed, then get
| the memory card working and remove that from the pi, then get
| the video and BIOS support working and remove that from the pi,
| eventually remove the last thing from the pi and crank the
| speed up about 30-times faster and you've got a gradually
| bootstrapped fully operational XT-clone.
|
| Its an interesting project plan, usually people bring up a
| system by having just CPU and memory at least partially
| working, then add peripherals like disk, display, rs232, GPIO,
| etc. But this way you can bring it all up, at least enough to
| run CP/M (err, ms-dos I guess?), admittedly glacially slowly
| and mostly emulated, and then upgrade the parts to hardware as
| see fit.
|
| Could probably do something with a FPGA that would be much more
| difficult but could at least run full speed (or maybe faster?).
| Of course in early 2022 what's more unobtanium, RasPis or
| FPGAs? If you can't buy either I guess it doesn't matter.
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(page generated 2022-05-20 23:01 UTC)