Designing an Intel 80386SX development board | Hacker News Reader

Designing an Intel 80386SX development board

blog.lse.epita.fr

76 pointsingve8 comments

Its purpose is mainly didactic for students or experienced developers who want to get started into x86 low-level programming.

And that's a noble idea. But this board has absolutely no I/O except for an LED. If you're going to teach embedded development, you really need to talk to some peripherals or understand how to manipulate on-chip registers. Modern SoCs work in a completely different manner than this board.

And, just to add a personal viewpoint, learning x86 low-level programming has very little value in the embedded systems market at this point in time.

indeed, this looks interesting how to do stuff with an fpga, but for basic embedded projects, I think arduino can lead much easier to results. this project looks also hard to reproduce elsewhere.

> If you're going to teach embedded development, you really need to talk to some peripherals or understand how to manipulate on-chip registers. Modern SoCs work in a completely different manner than this board

But the site explicitly says that it is intended to teach PC architecture and not embedded.

But you can pick up an 80386-class PC at a thrift store for a couple of dollars. And it will have I/O ports, a true northbridge controller (not this mystery FPGA), and probably even a hard drive.

And, if that's not an option, there's QEMU. Which AFAIK is free.

I really can't work out what the designers are thinking. If you want to learn low-level PC hacking, use QEMU. If you want to do your low-level PC hacking on an actual 80386 machine, go to the PC recycler, and if they still have anything that ancient around they will probably just give it to you for free, to be rid of it. Or you can spend $5 and get some Pentium class machine instead. And if you want to get into embedded development, for god's sake don't waste your time on all the byzantine cruft in the PC architecture - go get an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi or even some Cortex-M3 dev board. I don't see what's left for this project.

Woah.. I used to hang out near those guys 8 years ago (was a student there). I wish they would have teach us things like that. Great project !

I'm amazed that the NG80386SXLP20 is still available (in stock at Digikey).

I made a similar design 20 years ago, but with the IDT79R3041 MIPS CPU (sadly no longer available) and XC3030 FPGA: https://github.com/jhallen/joes-sandbox/tree/master/hw/handh...

I wonder how easy it is to find the old ICE stuff complete with bond out chips.

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