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

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#61

Post by girvo » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 5:38 AM UTC

cestith wrote: post #35

RandomOpinion wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

My other major hardware hobby project is a custom clone of a 100LX, based on a PIC32 running RetroBSD! Wire-wrapping tiny membrane keys is damned painful however so it’s been on the back burner for a while

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#62

Post by bikenaga » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #59

bikenaga wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 could…

The latch-things that were supposed to secure the cards in the slots apparently didn't seat the cards tightly enough. My dealer finally just replaced them with screws after I complained a few times about the graphics card coming loose, resulting in a poor signal.

Compatibility has been great in some ways. But with standards in flux back then, there was more variety (and maybe fun) than there is now. Besides experiments like the 2000, there were things like machines with 2 different CPUs (the Commodore SuperPet had a 6502 and a 6809, and I think the DEC Rainbow had a Z80 and and 8088). There were so many 5.25" floppy formats you needed utilities like Xenocopy to convert among them (I think it fiddled with the drive controller to manipulate the drive heads).

With machines being simpler, you could fiddle a lot more. Many magazines published assembly language code for little games and utilities; for that matter, the computer section of a typical bookstore carried lots of books on assembly language. There were books on microcomputer system design, stuff about how things worked at the chip level. All gone.

I remember Flight Simulator. I couldn't believe it the first time I played it. Crashed the plane over and over ... There was a graphical paint program, and other graphical stuff which worked with the very slow mouse - in fact, I have a copy of an ad featuring Bill Gates in which he describes using the 2000 in designing the early versions of Windows.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#63

Post by cestith » Mon, Jan 15, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

cestith wrote: post #35

RandomOpinion wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Actually, I'm partly mistaken. The 95LX had the V20. The 100LX, 200LX, and 1000CX it seems had an Intel 80c186 codenamed "Hornet" which competed with the V20.

Re: S80186: 16-bit 80186 compatible IP core

#64

Post by bitwize » Wed, Jan 17, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

bikenaga wrote: post #62

bitwize wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 could…

The latch-things that were supposed to secure the cards in the slots apparently didn't seat the cards tightly enough. My dealer finally just replaced them with screws after I complained a few times about the graphics card coming loose, resulting in a poor signal. Compatibility has been great in some ways. But with standards in flux back then, there was more variety (and maybe fun) than there is now. Besides experimen…

I'm a bit surprised that in your list of dual-CPU systems you didn't mention Tandy's own Model 16 -- which was a TRS-80 Model II fitted with a 68000 daughtercard and up to 768KiB RAM for the secondary processor. It was the first Unix-capable desktop not to come out of Sun.