alt Hacker NewsComputer-generated dream world: Virtual reality for a 286 processor
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Ha, little fall down the memory hole. I had a Harris 20mhz 286 back in the late 80's. I thought that thing was a beast at the time. Paired it with a Conner 100MB disk and I remember my brother laughing derisively, "Who the hell needs 100 megabytes?"
I've seen a similar project a while ago and thought this was about the same thing at first: [1][2]
Both essentially built a DIY chip tester for a 286 and both built around a Harris 80C286.
If I understood it correctly, the goal behind this project seems simulating the rest of the PC, purely for the challenge and learning experience, documenting the process of building the chip tester (and getting mildly philosophical in the process).
The other project was more directly interested in the 286 itself, undocumented instructions, corner cases in segmentation behavior, instruction cycle timing, etc. and also trying to find out if there are any difference between the Harris and Intel variants.
[1] https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/286-cpu-experiment...
Cool! But the wires!
I'm not a fan of breadboards, they tend to be unreliable even for trivial circuits. We need something more affordable and practical for home PCBs[^1]. Why is it that nobody has invented a tin 3D printer, or at least a 2D version of it, i.e. a tin plotter?
[^1]: I'm discouraged from home-etching by the chemicals and the dark-room part of the process.
Here's a project that also does this to ensure cycle-accuracy for their emulator: https://github.com/dbalsom/arduinoX86
> My first computer was a 286 with 1 MB of RAM and a 50 MB HDD
That was the configuration I had when I went to college. I had an amber monitor that had a really crisp image and 5.25" HD floppy drives. The AT case was fantastic, I wish I had one today.
Looking at the amount of wires going into this, my instinct is that this cannot scale, in 5-10 years this won't be doable for a Pentium chip, at least not as an at home hobby project. But I actually think it could go the other way, and in 5-10 years you'll be able to do this at home for far more sophisticated kit, unlocking crazy amounts of reverse engineering possibilities that were once thought of as near impossible, or at least only possible for a nation state scale setup.
Reminds me of the Tamagotchi Matrix:
https://hackaday.com/2015/11/24/building-the-infinite-matrix...
So they're stepping a 286 very slowly and sorta... bit-banging the I/O pins on it?
Love it. No notes.
Very impressive to use intel cpu without BIOS. Real hacker
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I'm Japanese, and the 80286 at 10MHz was huge for Japan's PC-98 scene. The V30 handled backward compatibility while the 286 ran much faster than what we had before. This project brought back memories—the 286 was the chip of my era, and it's great to see people still exploring its capabilities decades later.