Collaborate Disseminate
[Ted Fried] wrote in with not one but two (2!) new drop-in replacements for widespread old-school CPUs: the Zilog Z80 and the Intel 8088. Both of the “chips” run in …read more Continue reading Teensy Twofer of Plug-In Emulated Retro CPUs
A problem faced increasingly by retrocomputer enthusiasts everywhere is the supply of chips. Once a piece of silicon goes out of production its demand can be supplied for a time …read more Continue reading A Cycle-Accurate Intel 8088 Core For All Your Retro PC Needs
If you were around for the early days of the personal computer revolution, you’ll no doubt recall the excitement every time IBM announced a new version of its beige boxes. …read more Continue reading Bringing Up an Old Motherboard Is a Delicate Process
There was a time when an XT-class motherboard — like the old IBM PC with an 8088 CPU — was a high-tech accomplishment. Now, something like that is easily within …read more Continue reading Building your own 8088 XT motherboard
If you were around when the IBM PC rolled out, two things probably caught you by surprise. One is that the company that made the Selectric put that ridiculous keyboard …read more Continue reading How the IBM PC Went 8-Bit
“Bring our home computing out of the 1970s and into the 1980s and beyond” is the irresistible promise made by the creator of 8088ify, a piece of software which translates …read more Continue reading Translate Your CP/M Code to 8086, And Leave The 1970s Behind!
In the days when the best an impoverished student could hope to find in the way of computing was a cast-off 1980s PC clone, one upgrade was to fit an NEC V20 or V30 processor in place of the Intel 8088 or 8086. Whether it offered more than a marginal …read more
You have a clean MSDOS system, and you need to write some software for it. What do you do? You could use debug, of course. But there are no labels so while you can get machine code from mnemonics, you’ll still need to figure out the addresses on your own. That wasn’t good enough for [mniip], who created an assembler using mostly batch files. There are a few .COM files and it looks as if the first time you use debug to create those, but there’s also source you can assemble on subsequent builds with the assembler.
Why? We aren’t …read more
Continue reading Bootstrapping An MSDOS Assembler With Batch Files
Collecting old CPUs and firing them up again is all the rage these days, but how do you know if they will work? For many of these ICs, which ceased production decades ago, sorting the good stuff from the defective and counterfeit is a minefield.
Testing old chips is a challenge in itself. Even if you can find the right motherboard, the slim chances of escaping the effect of time on the components (in particular, capacitor and EEPROM degradation) make a reliable test setup hard to come by.
Enter [Samuel], and the Universal Chip Analyzer (UCA). Using an FPGA to …read more
Continue reading Universal Chip Analyzer: Test Old CPUs In Seconds
There is a high probability that the device on which you are reading this comes somehow loosely under the broad definition of a PC. The familiar x86 architecture with peripheral standards has trounced all its competitors over the years, to the extent that it is only in the mobile and tablet space of personal computing that it has not become dominant.
The modern PC with its multi-core processor and 64-bit instruction set is a world away from its 16-bit ancestor from the early 1980s. Those early PCs were computers in the manner of the day, in which there were relatively …read more
Continue reading Hackaday Prize Entry: A PC-XT Clone Powered By AVR