
Designing an Intel 80386SX development board - ingve
http://blog.lse.epita.fr/articles/77-lsepc-intro.html
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joezydeco
_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.

~~~
zokier
> 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.

~~~
joezydeco
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.

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marssaxman
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.

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ritonlajoie
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 !

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jhallenworld
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...](https://github.com/jhallen/joes-
sandbox/tree/master/hw/handheld)

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

