Now put it, together with some other useful boards, into a good non-plastic Amiga 600-sized wedge/keyboard case.
486Tang – 486 on a credit-card-sized FPGA board
51–60 of 60 posts
Re: 486Tang – 486 on a credit-card-sized FPGA board
#52I miss Intel's Quark chips. Tiny, cheap, and Pentium enough.
I found 10 Intel Galileo dev kits, new in box, left at our local recycling center on the "Free: Take Me Home" shelf. And just today, I received the Intel Edison dev kit that I'd purchased on eBay. The Galileo is a Quark X1000 SoC, two P54C cores. In-order, original 32-bit Pentium. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Galileo . The Edison is a modern System On Module about the size of an SD card but about 3x the thic…
> I found 10 Intel Galileo dev kits, new in box, left at our local recycling center on the "Free: Take Me Home" shelf.
Looks like an opportunity for a cluster in a picture frame. Did you get them?
I have one, a 4 RPI Zero W cluster in an Ikea picture frame:
Re: 486Tang – 486 on a credit-card-sized FPGA board
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any idea when Pixel86 is going to be available again or how/where to get an ITX-Llama system?
Pre-orders: https://retrodreams.ca/ Review - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9UdU89DDvY
Thanks!
It says this however:
"Expected to ship to customers in February 2025."
I wonder if a typo or if batch 2 is already gone too...
Re: 486Tang – 486 on a credit-card-sized FPGA board
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Windows, once you're in long mode, there's no 16-bit available to you. You can instead take the DOSBox or other VM route. Linux isn't really relevant given the time frame.
I left it open as to if it was a hardware or OS level item that prevents 16bit. Because I don't know, and don't care to dig that rabbit hole. Also- DOSBox is an emulator vs VMs are hardware, no? I suspect A VM won't fix the "no-op loop for timing" issue- with modern processors' lowest clock being 600-800Mhz before it gets C6/C7'd, 30 years of IPC improvement, and the possibility of the CPU itself optimizing such loop…
DOSBox is an emulator.
Re: 486Tang – 486 on a credit-card-sized FPGA board
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pre-orders: https://retrodreams.ca/ Review - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9UdU89DDvY
Thanks! It says this however: "Expected to ship to customers in February 2025." I wonder if a typo or if batch 2 is already gone too...
They have a contact us form, or discord.
Re: 486Tang – 486 on a credit-card-sized FPGA board
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pre-orders: https://retrodreams.ca/ Review - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9UdU89DDvY
Thanks! It says this however: "Expected to ship to customers in February 2025." I wonder if a typo or if batch 2 is already gone too...
Do people buy these things? It seems to me that shops touching Vortex86 always struggle to move them.
Re: 486Tang – 486 on a credit-card-sized FPGA board
#57Silly question. Are there any 486-compatible small CPUs that could be embedded into a project instead of using an FPGA? Given that AMD, Intel and others have the ability to make 486-compatible processors currently, I would have thought you could just buy a CPU or SoC to run 486 code.
There used to be single-chip x86 systems, but I don't know if they went all the way up to 486. You'd see them in early low power portables.
Re: 486Tang – 486 on a credit-card-sized FPGA board
#58From the reflections section:
> x86 vs. ARM. Working with ao486 deepened my respect for x86’s complexity. John Crawford’s 1990 paper “The i486 CPU: Executing Instructions in One Clock Cycle” is a great read; it argues convincingly against scrapping x86 for a new RISC ISA given the software base (10K+ apps then). Compatibility was the right bet, but the baggage is real. By contrast, last year’s ARM7‑based GBATang felt refreshingly simple: fixed‑length 32‑bit instructions, saner addressing, and competitive performance. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
Re: 486Tang – 486 on a credit-card-sized FPGA board
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found 10 Intel Galileo dev kits, new in box, left at our local recycling center on the "Free: Take Me Home" shelf. And just today, I received the Intel Edison dev kit that I'd purchased on eBay. The Galileo is a Quark X1000 SoC, two P54C cores. In-order, original 32-bit Pentium. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Galileo . The Edison is a modern System On Module about the size of an SD card but about 3x the thic…
> I found 10 Intel Galileo dev kits, new in box, left at our local recycling center on the "Free: Take Me Home" shelf. Looks like an opportunity for a cluster in a picture frame. Did you get them? I have one, a 4 RPI Zero W cluster in an Ikea picture frame: https://x.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/1163378341610688513
> Looks like an opportunity for a cluster in a picture frame. Did you get them?
Are you kidding? Of course I got them! :-)
It was actually better than that: they were in bulk boxes of five, there were at least eight such boxes. I took two, just to have one to play with and to get them out of the elements (they were on shelf that's partially protected on one side by a metal storage shed, but the shelf is just standing outdoors)..
I stopped by the local makerspace a day or two later, to let them know. I don't know what became of them.
My boxes got shoved to the back of the project queue and it's been about a year now. I just got them out about a week ago, looking into building the new firmware images.
These Intel Galileo dev kits are quite a bit bigger than a typical Arduino. They have the standard dual row inline headers of an Arduino (I think its pin-compatible), but lots more IO. There's Ethernet, for instance. Nearly the size of a Pico-ITX form factor.