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S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

jamieiles.com

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Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#51

Post by bitwize »

int_19h wrote: post #50
burfog wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core was compatible, but it came with built-in non-standard peripherals. It had a DMA controller, interrupt controller, and timer. None of these were PC compatible.

This particular one sounds like it has all of these, seeing how the webpage shows it running a bunch of DOS games.

I think he only duplicated the 80186 core (which itself was a bit different from the 8086 core and had a few more instructions), without adding the peripherals that came on-die on an actual 80186.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#52

Post by jacobush »

sehugg wrote: post #31
kbenson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Quake should only have worked well on a Pentium because it could execute float instructions in parallel with CPU instructions, or something. At least Quake was unplayable on my 486DX (don't remember MHz, 66 or below). Even Doom was too slow.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#53

Post by JdeBP »

katastic wrote: post #45
Posibyte wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The draw that this one gives me over the Zet processor (which btw is great and I've used it here and there in the past), is that Zet is not really maintained anymore. It's not a moving target, that's completely true, but S80x86 has the potential to hopefully do some neat things with 286's and 386's as well. But for anybody looking for a quick-n-dirty deploy to a board solution, the Zet is fantastic and solid.

It should be noted that 186's aren't even remotely compatible with 286's and 386's. And implementing a 286/386/486 is actually much harder and more complex than say, an 8086. That's why most people stop their hobby project at 8086 or 286. Because it becomes much more work to accomplish and the fun/novelty dries up.

Probably the same applies to why there are several home brewed Z80s and 6502s around, but few to no home brewed 68020s. (-:

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#54

Post by gaius »

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.

UK people might remember it as it was pretty popular in schools in the late 80s/early 90s

The Nimbus was an absolute horrific trainwreck of a machine - RM were only able to supplant the far superior Acorn in schools due to backdoor shenanigans. Imagine the world now if kids who had grown up on Archimedes went into companies and started using that tech there, we would be 15-20 years ahead of where we are now technologically. Instead the geniuses at the department of education collectively shot us all in the face.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#55

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

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…

Thus why the 80186 was mostly skipped in favour of the 80286, right?

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#56

Post by rrdharan »

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.

Fascinating - I grew up in Ontario in the 80s where we had the ICONs at school which were also, I just learned, 80186-based:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#57

Post by Zenst »

linker3000 wrote: post #27
Zenst wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The Apricot Qi came with a remote for booting. http://old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=995

Certainly was an Apricot, and the does look like it and may well be it, but this was 1984/5, which predates the 300 release. That said, was working for government IT department in one of the regional electricity supply companies and do recall the kit was in for evaluation and we did get pre-release kit in to look at. Though we are talking 8086 CPU time-rame here.

But without a doubt though it was an apricot, thank you for that. I did have a quick look or older models it may of been, nothing could pindown for sure. Though pre-release eval kit back then was much more fun and creative than today's verbatim to release.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#58

Post by bikenaga »

bitwize wrote: post #32
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 im…

Actually, you could go up to 896KB - it was not officially supported by Tandy, but there was a guy in Washington who had a company called Envision Designs that did this.

https://archive.org/stream/PortableComputingMagazineAug1985/...

I think I read about him first in Jerry Pournelle's coolumn in BYTE. So he modded my 2000 up to 896KB, and also added a disk controller and hard drive. Tandy eventually started selling cards with an 8087, which definitely helped with floating point stuff.

It was a wonderful machine. I first ran Turbo Pascal on it, did my first color Mandelbrot set. I had the color monitor and the inkjet printer. What is incredible is that for what I spent in 1984 dollars on all that stuff, adjusted for inflation, I could probably now get dual Xeons with 20 cores!

It was a very sad day when I realized that it was getting too hard to deal with the incompatibility with the IBM-PC standard. The video RAM (and 640 x 400 8-color graphics), the nonstandard floppy disks, the add-on cards (which could be installed without opening the case), ... Technical superiority isn't always conclusive.

The original BYTE review, for anyone who's interested:

http://tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/acrobat/...

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#59

Post by bitwize »

bikenaga wrote: post #58
bitwize wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 im…

Actually, you could go up to 896KB - it was not officially supported by Tandy, but there was a guy in Washington who had a company called Envision Designs that did this. https://archive.org/stream/PortableComputingMagazineAug1985/... I think I read about him first in Jerry Pournelle's coolumn in BYTE. So he modded my 2000 up to 896KB, and also added a disk controller and hard drive. Tandy eventually started selling c…

Yeah, those tray-like expansion cards were neat. Too bad that idea never caught on, and there were only a few expansion cards (all by Tandy) available for the machine.

PC compatibility basically steamrolled over all that. Maybe it was seeing what happened with the 2000 that convinced me from an early age that PCs were going to conquer the world, and Macintosh and Amiga fanboys were next on the chopping block. I couldn't even guess then how right I'd be; not even game consoles avoided turning into cut-down, purpose-built PCs.

At the time, I was just disappointed that the only graphical game that actually worked with the 2000 was a specially ported Flight Simulator 1.0.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#60

Post by Posibyte »

I just had a play going through the source and adding support for a board of my own, and if OP is reading this, I want to share my appreciation for how well this project is laid out. A lot of hardware projects are sort of spaghetti dishes, but this one is very well laid out, tested very well, and feels very clean to work with. Because this helps me with something I'm working on, I wanted to express my gratitude for that.

Thanks :)

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