TinyLLama – A Tiny x86 Retrocomputer | Hacker News Reader

TinyLLama – A Tiny x86 Retrocomputer

github.com

102 pointsgattilorenz25 comments

I love it that the RaspberryPi has become an expansion-adapter for projects like this. That 486 is getting so much more out of life for the fact of having an ARM co-processor.

It is such an excellent example of accessorized computing. Note that its not just for things like retro-emulation of sounds cards - folks have built new synthesizer and audio-processing platforms around the concept, too.

What's really great is that this allows entirely generations of hackers to get to know and understand the PC architecture in an environment that is conducive to further creative hacking. I've been teaching my kids' and their friends a bit about assembly language, using an old 8088-based PC with DEBUG.COM onboard for simplicity, and this TinyLLama may well be the next best thing ..

This one has been making the rounds. Three cool things oft overlooked:

1) Its double-retro in the sense that the 86duino is a decade old, so you've got the retro dos under the retro hardware in 2022 almost 2023. Cool!

2) The 86duino is a window into an alternate history where "something desktop-ish" got wedged into the existing Arduino form factor and electronic API, kind of, whereas IRL we all know the RasPi did its own thing. Its not as simple as "a Pi in the shape of an arduino mega or uno" but conceptually its like that. Sometimes in the real world, backward compatibility with The Standard just doesn't sell in the marketplace.

3) There was a time in the early days of the 86duino where you could buy "arduino form factor boards" with memory sizes ranging from individual bytes up to a fraction of a gig on the 86duino. I think this might be the widest range in the entire history of computing. IBM's 360 series and DEC's numerous PDP8 implementations never came close to this range. It would be like having the Wright Flyer and the SR-71 in commercial production and sale at the same time. The closest analogy I can come up with would be 1970s ham radio equipment where you had some people selling vacuum tube kits/gear and some people selling microprocessor driven kits/gear (well, toward the very end of the 70s...) both on the market at the same time. Sometimes tech moves faster than business, most times it doesn't.

Absolutely brilliant! Well done!

On behalf of the open source/open hardware enthusiast community, thank you, thank you, thank you!

Also, I think that it might potentially be a good idea -- to start a Kickstarter campaign!

You could probably make a few $$$'s (or 'kr's, since you're in Norway!) -- ("beer money") -- from a small ethical profit margin -- while providing the community with this absolutely stellar piece of open hardware! A win-win!

Anyway, absolutely great work!

Great! i have a huge 486 with soundblaster awe32 laying around to run the future mind dos based mindmachine. I only have to hook up a parallel port converter to this board which is probably larger. But AWE support is lacking... could it be emulated somehow? Or perhaps I could use Dosbox on a raspberry pi.

Love it. There's a decent number of these still available for commercial applications.

I'll have to dig it out but there was a guy who got a game running on a dosboard used in a piece commercial kitchen hardware[0-1].

And even "gaming" machines[2]. I bet LGR on YouTube would love it.

[0] https://youtu.be/BdSJgoP2a88

[1] https://youtu.be/8fSdLKx5HlU

[2] https://youtu.be/USHvvSbYmJA

It mentions specifically DOS - Would it be able to boot and successfully run Windows 95/98? There's a lot of games from that period that would fun to play again without broken emulators (qemu, etc).

Short answer: Maybe[1]

Longerish answer: Still maybe, drivers are going to be an issue. Just because the thing can boot into a DOS compatible mode doesn't mean it will have windows 9x compatible drivers. Having DOS drivers does not also make something automagically windows 9x compatible either[2]. That said it should be plausible to get a board like Rastari did that is fairly compatible because industrial reasons. But it does mean you have to pick carefully.

[1] https://www.vortex86.com/news/3 [2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20071224-00/?p=24...

No, well, not supported anyway

https://www.vortex86.com/news/3

The column you're looking for is the VEX model of chip

Every chip in their lineup can run W95 except the EX series and the VDX3 can run Win7. I don't know the technical reason why, obviously some chipset feature that W95 really needs.

I was pretty interested in this hardware when it was new and I'm happy to still see it actively discussed.

> There's a lot of games from that period that would fun to play again without broken emulators (qemu, etc).

Not to mention the nominative determinism that is getting Winamp to run on this.

Just a sidenote, I have been able to run Windows 98 on an Ivy Bridge computer (an Optiplex). PCI cards work if you have drivers (I have a Soundblaster PCI128). My main motivation has been for MIDI, (Cubase 2.8). I haven't tried any games. When installing, run "setup.exe /p i" to disable ACPI which will mess up the installation.

I guess the obligatory question "will it run Doom?" answers itself in this case...

Is this CPU similar to a Pentium in terms of protected mode / virtual memory?

i.e. can it run netbsd? linux? Even if uninterested in doing so, I'd like to have a grasp of what sort of compatibility this relatively unknown cpu has.

It should be relatively easy to get Linux running on it, especially in text mode. But why would you do that? Wouldn’t a raspberry be a better option for that?

Again,

>I'd like to have a grasp of what sort of compatibility this relatively unknown cpu has.

I do not plan to run Linux on this. But I might want to run MenuetOS[0], KolibriOS[1], Aros[2], ZealOS[3], to give you some examples.

0. https://www.menuetos.net/

1. https://kolibrios.org/en/

2. https://aros.sourceforge.io/

3. https://zealos.net/

I assume the main challenge for these others is drivers. Linux does run on it, but apparently only few selected distributions: https://www.vortex86.com/news/2

If drivers are an issue on Linux, I'd expect them to be an issue in DOS, too.

DOS programs (incl. games) do like to hit the hardware directly after all.

I don’t think I understand your point. I thought that DOS mostly relies on the BIOS to initialize and access hardware (keyboard, video, disks), no drivers needed there. Games access the hardware directly, but they mostly only use VGA registers that any graphic card handles (plus audio, but that’s similar given the SB emulation).

On the other hand, Linux needs more hardware and relies much less on the BIOS. The kernel won’t be able to access e.g. the hard drive if it can’t speak to/initialize the IDE controller directly, something neither DOS nor any game needs to do.

Or did I misunderstand something?

Is the Vortex86EX the only remaining i486 processor in production?

I think it has 586 instructions, but speed is like a 486.

Does it run like a 300Mhz 486 would or is the IPC so bad that the clock boost is all wasted compensating for silicon design limitations?

Intel Quark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quark) has been updated with 586 instructions, but is still built around the 486's 5 stage pipeline.

I thought Quark was out of production at this point (last shipment was supposedly July 2022).

And yeah, I remember all the segfault fun trying to get a generic Linux distro running on it at a hackathon back in 2014.

I had the same issue - iirc it's a 486 with some Pentium extensions. It has enough of the 586 set to fool you into thinking it is one, but not enough to fool glibc. So you need to have glibc specifically built for i486 otherwise life gets dark.

Intel's management engine is built on their Quark architecture now, and runs Minix 3. Doesn't seem like Intel is likely to change this any time soon, as the previous architecture they used was a real odd duck and Quark seems like a much better fit. So it's likely to ship in every Intel machine for the foreseeable future.

This is extremely cool for a non-expandable machine.

I still wish somebody targeted a known form factor like mini-itx, offering something like pci+eisa for bus interfaces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com