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A 386 PC for Your RP2350

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Re: A 386 PC for Your RP2350

#41

Post by lightedman »

vardump wrote: post #39
lightedman wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had Win95 running on a 25MHz 4MB FPRAM 286 back in high school. Poor teacher, half of first period was roughly how long it took to boot up, only for them to exit into DOS mode because the grading software and report card software was DOS-native and would hang if you tried running it under the GUI.

You certainly did not, as Win95 requires 32-bit, 80386 or better. 286 was a 16-bit CPU.

Windows 95 had a beta build for 286 systems, which is what this system 'ran.'

Bet you don't even know about Windows 97.

Re: A 386 PC for Your RP2350

#43

Post by supergarfield »

guenthert wrote: post #22

Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU? I recall VICE emulating the Brotkasten on 386 PCs some thirty years ago, later UAE doing it for Amiga. How long til my currently running system (anno 2016) is being emulated?

Maybe never with current technology? Looking just at the CPU and assuming you need comfortable IPC overhead for emulation, the 386 was from early in the Dennard scaling era and modern CPUs are 1000x or more faster single-thread. Since maybe 2012 that hasn't moved anywhere near that, certainly less than 10x.

Figure 6 in "A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture" is a good representation of that effect: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3282307.

For the GPU things are potentially looking better! But since distributed shaders/kernels are higher-level compiled for your specific device, there's less of a need for emulation.

Re: A 386 PC for Your RP2350

#44

Post by theamk »

guenthert wrote: post #22

Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU? I recall VICE emulating the Brotkasten on 386 PCs some thirty years ago, later UAE doing it for Amiga. How long til my currently running system (anno 2016) is being emulated?

Either "already" or "not any time soon", depending on how you count.

Already - because you have VMs and backwards compatibility. As long as you keep using Intel x86_64, your apps would run, no emulation needed. Or you can use the VM.

Not any time soon - because the computers are not speeding up that fast. 10 year old computers are still being used today, and even the latest CPUs are not orders of magnitude faster. So for a full-system emulation, the most well-known ones is x86 VM's on Apple Silicon, and according to reports, full-system mode is still not close to regular PCs.

Re: A 386 PC for Your RP2350

#45

Post by [deleted] »

IshKebab wrote: post #17
cold_pizz4 wrote: post #13

I love it! The RP2350 is probably the most underrated microcontroller available today.

Overrated surely? It's a pretty bog standard MCU, no wireless support, mediocre deep sleep. I don't know why you'd pick it over an ESP32 or nRF5x. The only standout feature is PIO which is definitely interesting but very niche. It's also patented so say goodbye to any portability or FOSS vibes. (If you want a FOSS version btw, check out https://baochip.com/ ) If it didn't have the Raspberry name behind it nobody woul…

[deleted]

Re: A 386 PC for Your RP2350

#46

Post by [deleted] »

IshKebab wrote: post #17
cold_pizz4 wrote: post #13

I love it! The RP2350 is probably the most underrated microcontroller available today.

Overrated surely? It's a pretty bog standard MCU, no wireless support, mediocre deep sleep. I don't know why you'd pick it over an ESP32 or nRF5x. The only standout feature is PIO which is definitely interesting but very niche. It's also patented so say goodbye to any portability or FOSS vibes. (If you want a FOSS version btw, check out https://baochip.com/ ) If it didn't have the Raspberry name behind it nobody woul…

[deleted]

Re: A 386 PC for Your RP2350

#47

Post by nullsmack »

badsectoracula wrote: post #14
xhrpost wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did not realize that Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX.

It "technically" can - i used Win95 on an AMD 386DX with 4MB of RAM back in the 90s for a little. Most of the time was spent waiting for the computer to do something while the HDD was constantly working. The Pentium MMX with 32MB i replaced it with was MUCH faster, practically everything was instant.

I tried installing it on my 20mhz 486 IBM but the install never would finish even though the minimum specs listed 386. I always thought that was being too generous. I did use it on faster 486's at some point in school (I think 66mhz or faster?)

Re: A 386 PC for Your RP2350

#49

Post by Lerc »

IshKebab wrote: post #17
cold_pizz4 wrote: post #13

I love it! The RP2350 is probably the most underrated microcontroller available today.

Overrated surely? It's a pretty bog standard MCU, no wireless support, mediocre deep sleep. I don't know why you'd pick it over an ESP32 or nRF5x. The only standout feature is PIO which is definitely interesting but very niche. It's also patented so say goodbye to any portability or FOSS vibes. (If you want a FOSS version btw, check out https://baochip.com/ ) If it didn't have the Raspberry name behind it nobody woul…

If you want something that can do some dumb buttons and lights handling on a mass consumer device, it's not ideal.

I would say it is still underrated.

PIO combined with DMA and the independent bus SRAM banks allow for immense combinations of capability.

If you want to do something digital and specific beyond a few MHz the the RP2350 raised the ceiling of what you can do before requiring hardware or FPGA.

It still has some areas where it could be improved, but most of thise would not have been apparent until you really stretched the design.

Having extra PIO GPIO without physical pins but the ability to configure connecting pairs together in software would add a lot of capability.

Perhaps an interesting test/benchmark would be to get a microcontroller to pretend to be an SRAM (or better yet two independently accessed SRAMs) while outputting the lyrics to still alive on a serial link.

The virtual SRAM performance characteristics of timing tolerances and latency would be a respectable approximation for arbitrary digital signal handling that any particular MCU might be able to manage.

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