The goal is x86 assembly. Is there even such a thing as a 8086 or 186 development board though?

Sure, it's called "A laptop".

Seriously, what do you want to do with the hardware?

If you want to learn ARM, hard to go wrong with a Raspberry Pi and you have little pins to do stuff with.

If you ...

I see, maybe I'm too used to high level languages where if you learn one, then learning the others is a lot easier.

The goal is x86 assembly. Is there even such a thing as a 8086 or 186 development board though?

It's an interesting idea. A lot of work to find out if it's practical or not.
So I've just thought of the craziest idea... what if you programmed an os entirely in vhdl? Obviously it could only ever run one os since it would be directly programmed in hardware but that single os would experience a ...

So I take it the best CPU to learn assembly programming is the 6502, based on the elegance everybody mentions here... Although the main reason why I want to learn assembly programming in the first place is to be able to program in x86 and ARM assembly. So do you think the 6502 would make a good ...

I just found a youtube video demonstrating his radio. Apparently it required at least 120 volts to drive a pc speaker at high volume. Probably would explode like a firework after 10 minutes of that though XD

It's widely held that the 6809 is very good, and the 6309 is even better. Of course, my own favourite is the 6502.

(Edit: just spotted that this is a poll. What's 65k - is that meant to be 68k? Because of course the 68k is another kind of thing altogether. Or is it meant to be 65816?? I've never ...

BigEd,

You're right, my mistake.

But I still think the iapx32's failure was mostly unrelated to its mega-cisc complexity. By that logic, modern x64 cpus must be even slower. And I dont think an 8086 even at a 7 nm process would run half as many fps on starcraft/whatever as a p3 :P

And although ...

So, really impractical idea for a rube-goldberg cpu here...

Vfds are basically just an array of tiny vacuum tube "transistors", and have been used in ham radios already as amplifiers... don't believe me?

Since triodes seem to work like a pnp bjt when a + voltage is applied to the grid, and a npn ...

Been looking for a laptop to play with low-level programming on... I'd like something running ~100mhz with a simple enough design for a newbie to understand, but complex enough to run a "real" os like win 3.1 or at least dos. So far my top choices are

The Toshiba libretto

The gateway handbook ...

Hey all,

I've been thinking, any cpu that supports interrupts should easily be able to connect to an external mmu, 68451-style... right? Anyone ever tried to make an external mmu out of 74xx parts for a 6502/other cpu?

What about exotic physics-based ideas? Would cooling such a device to below-zero temps, using ecl, asynchronous logic, or 3d printing a cpu so components can be placed directly above/below each other and therefore get much closer to each other increase speed significantly?

Wow... get well soon marco, if you ever see this... hope you're ok!

I realize on a site called 6502.org yall are probably a little biased, but in your opinion, which of the cpus from the 80s was the most elegant/most powerful/just plain best?

Something like the Intel iAPX 432 ?

Mike B.

Well... yes and no. Of course it had no real os. But keep in mind, it came out a year before the 8086. Yes it had poor performance compared even to contemporary processors of the day. But , an application running on it (stretching your comparison a ...

Hey all,

So I've just thought of the craziest idea... what if you programmed an os entirely in vhdl? Obviously it could only ever run one os since it would be directly programmed in hardware but that single os would experience a huge improvement in speed since it wouldn't be to be "translated" into ...