A 386 PC for Your RP2350

dvdkon•23 minutes ago

It's really cool what can be done today with just an MCU that has sufficiently flexible IO. What's the performance like?

burstmode•about 1 hour ago

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.

kees99•4 minutes ago

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.

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-size, it's just a matter of wiring an ISA slot to the RP.

cold_pizz4•about 1 hour ago

I love it! The RP2350 is probably the most underrated microcontroller available today.

IshKebab•11 minutes ago

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.

willis936•2 minutes ago

The PIO are pretty great and not niche. Almost any embedded application needs mixed signal interfaces. You could say embedded applications are niche, but not that embedded applications needing mixed signal interfaces.

A serious warning: read the RP2350 errata carefully. You may be better off buying old 2040 inventory.

weinzierl•about 2 hours ago

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.

fifilura•about 2 hours ago

(slackware) Just need to find where you stored all 20 floppy disks...

weinzierl•about 1 hour ago

I think it came with two 3.5" disks, a bootdisk and a rootdisk, as well as two CDs. One was the actual distro, the other a sunsite mirror.

At least that is what I remember and while that memory might be hazy I know exactly where my precious is.

rwmj•about 1 hour ago

I definitely remember installing it off 20+ floppies onto a 386 back in the day. Most of the disks contained packages and you didn't need to install all of them though.

xhrpost•about 1 hour ago

Did not realize that Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX.

st_goliath•32 minutes ago

> Win95 can technically run on a 20Mhz 386DX

s/technically/allegedly/

with a minimum of 4M RAM [1]. I have a machine with twice that clock and the twice that RAM that a friends parents wanted to toss out[2]. I spent the better part of a day getting Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 to run. Playing around with it for a bit, I highly doubt that Windows 95 would be anything but endlessly frustrating. I was not masochistic enough to try.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements

[2] https://goliath32.com/hw/machines.html#pc386

badsectoracula•41 minutes ago

It "technically" can - i used Win95 on an AMD 386DX with 4MB of RAM back in the 90s for a little. Most of the time was spent waiting for the computer to do something while the HDD was constantly working.

The Pentium MMX with 32MB i replaced it with was MUCH faster, practically everything was instant.

weinzierl•about 1 hour ago

Good question. I ran Slackware Linux and DOS 5.0 on mine. I think Win95 was my Pentium 100 MHz already so it sounds a bit sus, but the FAQ section of OP had items about Win95, that is where I got the idea from.

jwrallie•about 1 hour ago

Really cool, wondering if it can be ported to the PicoCalc.

Tepix•about 2 hours ago

Time to dig up 386bsd

momocowcow•about 2 hours ago

yes, but those screenshots are EGA

patrick_rtk•about 1 hour ago

nice job

A 386 PC for Your RP2350

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Discussion (18 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews