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- Hacker News
- Is this an emulator or firmware that makes the Pi a cycle accurate implementation of 386, just with a bit of hardware shims for modern accessories?
- Was the performance mentioned anywhere - I couldn't find it on the page?by nickcw
- Should be on the fast end of the 386 spectrum since it tentatively supports 486 and 586 architectures too.by dingdingdang
- In case anyone missed it earlier on HN, there is a similar project that runs on an ESP32: https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386by jasongill
- That one is offering Pentium Pro and SSE3 emulation. Not too shabby.by LeFantome
- Which of the 4 boards on do you recommend as easiest? I would love to demo at the Computer Museum @ System Source https://museum.sysrc.com
It looks like I would have to build my own frank board. Any off the shelf boards?
by broswell - To save anyone the Google, there's an S missing from the URL.by Nexxxeh
- Does it emulate RS232 ports and printer ports as well ? I did'nt find anything. Then it would be possible to reuse old embedded equipment.by burstmode
- > Then it would be possible to reuse old embedded equipment.
Unlikely, virtualization/emulation has been a thing well before this project and you can just buy USB to RS232 adapters. There are GPIO solutions for industrial PCs other than the parallel port. Or you can simply buy new industrial PCs which have those ports.
If you find an industrial appliance controlled by genuine old PC hardware that hasn't been replaced, the RS232 ports are the least of your concerns.
In my experience, such machines usually have something insanely proprietary plugging into a custom ISA card, and whatever is connected to it usually doesn't take too kindly if the bus timings are off. And neither does the accompanying bare metal software that relies heavily on timing loops and hardware peculiarities.
by st_goliath - No, it doesn't.
Also this doesn't emulate ISA bus, where one could plug one of those "multi-io" cards to get rs232/printer ports.
Which is a shame. There are plenty of GPIO pins to fit full ISA on RP2350 (at least on "B" variant), and those GPIO are supposedly 5V-tolerant (with sufficiently recent silicon revision). So hardware-wise, it's just a matter of wiring up an ISA slot directly to the RP chip.
by kees99 - What a long way to have come from the beige towers!by zabriel_goss
- The problem is PC programs assume 640kb of RAM and the RP2350 has 512kb + 16kb cache SRAM so anything that goes past that has a sudden 40 cycle access delay.
So even if you account for the RP2350 being 6 times faster than the RP2350, I think the emulation would randomly start to stutter a lot in certain circumstances waiting to access that part of the memory.
by ilaksh - How is the RP2350 6 times faster than the RP2350? That must be a typo...by dark-star
- That isn't true to my knowledge for old DOS applications (including games). 640kb was the upper limit, not the lower bound.by luma
- I had Slackware CDs in the nineties! They had a minimalist label and came with no jewel case (rubber band if I recall correctly).
I've been meaning to rediscover the CICA and Simtel collections. Maybe that's what I needed!
by gxd - Looks like it can even run Windows 96. Incredibly cool. I'll have to try if it runs my old Slackware kernal 1.2.13 some time. I used it with a 4MiB, 25Mhz 386 DX back in the time, so it should.by weinzierl
- I don't know if they have some kind of magically genius caching system but the chip only has 512kb of SRAM and a little cache and the rest has to be managed by flash memory which is like 30+ times slower so I dunno about the performance of that.by ilaksh
- (slackware) Just need to find where you stored all 20 floppy disks...by fifilura
- Did not realize that Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX.by xhrpost
- I love it! The RP2350 is probably the most underrated microcontroller available today.by cold_pizz4
- Overrated surely? It's a pretty bog standard MCU, no wireless support, mediocre deep sleep. I don't know why you'd pick it over an ESP32 or nRF5x.
The only standout feature is PIO which is definitely interesting but very niche. It's also patented so say goodbye to any portability or FOSS vibes. (If you want a FOSS version btw, check out https://baochip.com/)
If it didn't have the Raspberry name behind it nobody would even have heard of it.
by IshKebab - It's really cool what can be done today with just an MCU that has sufficiently flexible IO. What's the performance like?by dvdkon
- Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU?
I recall VICE emulating the Brotkasten on 386 PCs some thirty years ago, later UAE doing it for Amiga. How long til my currently running system (anno 2016) is being emulated?
by guenthert - >Holy cow, a 386 with VGA and SoundBlaster on a $1 MCU?
The right software -- really does add value(!) to (let's-just-say-it-isn't-an-nVidia-GB300!) hardware, now doesn't it? :-)
I don't know about anyone else -- but I'm sold!
The value proposition on this one is truly awesome!
- Either "already" or "not any time soon", depending on how you count.
Already - because you have VMs and backwards compatibility. As long as you keep using Intel x86_64, your apps would run, no emulation needed. Or you can use the VM.
Not any time soon - because the computers are not speeding up that fast. 10 year old computers are still being used today, and even the latest CPUs are not orders of magnitude faster. So for a full-system emulation, the most well-known ones is x86 VM's on Apple Silicon, and according to reports, full-system mode is still not close to regular PCs.
by theamk - Maybe never with current technology? Looking just at the CPU and assuming you need comfortable IPC overhead for emulation, the 386 was from early in the Dennard scaling era and modern CPUs are 1000x or more faster single-thread. Since maybe 2012 that hasn't moved anywhere near that, certainly less than 10x.
Figure 6 in "A New Golden Age for Computer Architecture" is a good representation of that effect: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3282307.
For the GPU things are potentially looking better! But since distributed shaders/kernels are higher-level compiled for your specific device, there's less of a need for emulation.