S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core • Hacker News Board

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#31

Post by sehugg » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

kbenson wrote: post #11

vardump wrote: post #5

Pretty cool as a design like this should be able to better preserve old system behavior than what DOSBox etc. can achieve. Although it seems a bit slow side at 50 MHz, I guess it's not a pipelined design? Not that original 80186 was pipelined either. :)

The 80286's I grew up using were between 4 and 12 MHz, depending on which model I was on and whether "Turbo" was enabled. 50 MHz is mid to low end 486 territory clock rate, which if it handles instructions as well (a big if) puts it squarely in the area of a lot of games.

If it isn't pipelined, then it'll probably be more like a 286 or 386 performance-wise. IIRC, Quake only had a smooth framerate on my 486DX-33 with floating-point support.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#32

Post by bitwize » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:12 PM UTC

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #2

This is pretty cool. A PC with an 80186 CPU is a little weird, though; I don't think many of those actually existed. It seems like virtually everybody went straight from 8086 to 80286

The Tandy 2000 was one. It was a PC-ish, DOS-running machine that was more powerful than anything put out by IBM at the time, but not PC compatible. The 186 had additional on-chip hardware like timers, etc. that the 8086 (and 286 and subsequent chips) did not, and some of these were mapped to I/O address space that corresponded to different PC hardware, so building a fully PC compatible machine with a 186 was near impossible.

Forgoing PC compatibility was not without its advantages. The Tandy 2000 could have up to 768k of RAM -- and used all of it, the 640k limit being nonexistent. This made a huge difference in applications such as Lotus 1-2-3. The Tandy 2000 also featured a 640x400 color display option -- extremely high resolution for the time -- at an affordable price, making it attractive as a graphical workstation. Tandy 2000s were used in the design of Stars and Stripes 87, an America's Cup winning yacht, and were also used to prototype color display in Windows 1.0. So it was an important machine, despite fading into obscurity due to its lack of PC compatibility.

Sorry, I just frickin' love this machine and wish it were more remembered.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#33

Post by monocasa » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

> Intel Cyclone V

That's still weird to see; it's kind of like AMD Radeon was for a few years.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#34

Post by petercooper » Sat, Jan 13, 2018, 11:55 PM UTC

pm215 wrote: post #7

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #2

This is pretty cool. A PC with an 80186 CPU is a little weird, though; I don't think many of those actually existed. It seems like virtually everybody went straight from 8086 to 80286

The RM Nimbus was 186-based ( https://www.thenimbus.co.uk/range-of-nimbus-computers/PC-186 ) -- UK people might remember it as it was pretty popular in schools in the late 80s/early 90s. It wasn't fully PC compatible though.

Prior to their purchase, I recall my dad spending some time trying to persuade my headmistress that the RM Nimbus was a bad choice and we should have "real PCs" in school instead. Unfortunately it turned out the powers that be had a contract with RM and the choice of machine was basically forced upon schools.

With that said, beyond the odd software incompatibilities, I found it an interesting system. Its BASIC was pretty good and it had a music chip integrated at a time when almost no machines had sound cards.

Anyone else remember "TRAINS"? :-D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvwoPUqDCa4

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#35

Post by cestith » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 1:19 AM UTC

RandomOpinion wrote: post #8

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #2

This is pretty cool. A PC with an 80186 CPU is a little weird, though; I don't think many of those actually existed. It seems like virtually everybody went straight from 8086 to 80286

There wasn't any real reason to use the 80186 in a PC; it was meant for embedded devices. The only major feature that it had was some additional hardware for timers and DMA built in. Everything else was (more or less) architecturally the same as the 8086. Probably the last series of 80186 PCs ever made were HP's 100LX / 200LX, a palmtop DOS based PDA that was released in the mid-'90s IIRC. It was an amazing little ga…

Those were compatible but actually used the NEC V20 processor. I have a 95LX, 100LX, a couple 200LX and I'm in the market for a 4MB 200LX and maybe the 1000CX (which lacks the built-in spreadsheet).

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#36

Post by ChuckMcM » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 1:54 AM UTC

Wow, trip down memory lane. My "starter" project when I joined Intel out of college was to be the Systems Validation engineer for the 80186. Unlike the 8086 it was this new fangled thing called a "system on chip" (SoC) which of course is what nearly everything is these days. And because Intel chose the peripherals to put "on chip" as it were they picked the ones they liked, and Microsoft obligingly wrote a version of MS-DOS that could use those peripherals. Critically though, they were not exactly like the set of peripherals the IBM PC used so while it was "cheaper" to put all the interface chips together with the CPU (saving power, board real estate, and time) it meant using the chip would never be "FlightSimulator" compatible (where MS Flight Sim was considered the acid test of whether or not a clone was a clone.). So much commercial software bypassed the BIOS and wrote directly to the peripherals that the 80186 never became very popular in the commercial sector. It did however have a pretty strong military presence and a lot of the customers who sent in bug reports would decline to describe their systems :-)

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#37

Post by slededit » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 2:37 AM UTC

vardump wrote: post #5

Pretty cool as a design like this should be able to better preserve old system behavior than what DOSBox etc. can achieve. Although it seems a bit slow side at 50 MHz, I guess it's not a pipelined design? Not that original 80186 was pipelined either. :)

FPGAs run an order of magnitude slower than an ASIC would. Most of this is due to routing delays unless you take great care and do a lot of it semi-manually. On the logic side you can't easily do a lot of the fun stuff like cycle stealing and using latches because the FPGA toolchains don't handle that well.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#38

Post by anyfoo » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 3:02 AM UTC

Zenst wrote: post #23

anyfoo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cut my teeth on a "Siemens PC-D", a German variation on the IBM PC. Not quite compatible but almost. It had an 80186, 1MB of RAM (extreme at the time) and many other niceties that a normal IBM PC didn't have. I think it even had an external MMU, at least it could run SINIX. Though there were UNIX clones like PC/IX and early XENIX versions that ran without MMU on stock IBM XTs, without protection obviously, so I'm n…

Was that the one that came with a remote control to turn it on and off?

I don't think so... I mean, could be, but I somehow doubt it. This was around the middle of the 80s, by the way.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#39

Post by drmpeg » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 3:05 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #36

Wow, trip down memory lane. My "starter" project when I joined Intel out of college was to be the Systems Validation engineer for the 80186. Unlike the 8086 it was this new fangled thing called a "system on chip" (SoC) which of course is what nearly everything is these days. And because Intel chose the peripherals to put "on chip" as it were they picked the ones they liked, and Microsoft obligingly wrote a version of…

It did however have a pretty strong military presence...

The ground communications network for the Air Force DSP satellite program (boost phase missile warning) was built with 80186 processors. The hub routers were multi-processor systems with six 80186's or five 80186's and a 80386.

These systems were used to provide early warning of SCUD missile attacks during the first Gulf War. They were installed in 1988 and decommissioned in 2005.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#40

Post by gbraad » Sun, Jan 14, 2018, 3:16 AM UTC

Have a look at: http://zet.aluzina.org/index.php/Zet_processor which can actually run Dune 2: http://zet.aluzina.org/images/b/bd/Vga-4.jpg and more http://zet.aluzina.org/index.php/Pictures like MS Windows 3.0, MS DOS 6.22 etc. This runs on an older Altera DE1 (Cyclone III-based) board