11 Oct
2005
11 Oct
'05
10:46 a.m.
Can't help with the evaluation board, but the
mention
of the 80186 reminds me of a system I worked on
(Durango Poppy) using one (an added 80286 was an
option if you wanted to run Unix).
Interesting. Wish there was some info on that.
It's a great chip for its time with DMA done the
right way and lots of I/O pins. Unfortunately, any
programs that play with PC hardware are doomed to
failure.
Right. Those aspects of typical pc hardware that had
been integrated on the chip. Seemingly though, the
Tandy 2000 ignored at least some of the extra
facilities of the 80186 and simply utilized it as a
fast 8086. That board has one of the highest chip
counts I've ever seen. But it's also true that video
and much else was integrated.
I've got a little FAX receiver box that was
designed
to fit between a printer and a PC and would either
print FAXen as received or store them on a
DOS->formatted 1.44MB floppy drive
that was part of
the >unit. It uses an 80C188 and I recall looking at
the >27C256 BIOS and noting that it implemented many
of >the PC BIOS calls, particularly those for diskette
I/O. It has 256K of RAM. The thing isn't much
bigger than a floppy drive and is powered by a wall
wart. It'd make a neat little CP/M-86 system if I
ever got around to programming it.
I'd guess the bios was bought, or at least parts of
it, from a supplier of such (AMI, Phoenix...).
But this brings up a question--how many early non-PC
PC's are there wandering around? IOW, things that
have the ability to run a full operating system, but
aren't PC's per se. My DSL model is certainly
one-->runs Linux (just
telnet to it and you get a
login).
I opened up a color IBM terminal years ago, mainly
because I wanted to see if the monitor could be
utilized as a vga (apparently had analog inputs, and
only r,g,b, and sync lines). Phor phun. 3179 is the #
sticking in my head, which might correspond to the
model number. But then again it might not. I never
actually bothered, but upon cursory observation of the
logic board - 8088 based - I was amazed how much "pc
stuph" was present. In other words most of the makings
of a pc/xt motherboard were present as I recall. Of
course there were no provision for disk drives and
whatnot, and may not even have had a bios as we know
it. I'd like to get another one.
BYTE tried to deal with a similar issue issue years
ago ~'85 in one of their special issues. They wanted a
baseline for IBM compatibility. As loopy as it sounds,
the Zenith Z-100 was elected a basis by which all
others were compared. Funny that an incompatible was
used to judge all the other compatibles.
I'm not sure if that counts, though. It may well
not
be running Linux
on anything that you would recognise as PC hardware.
It might not have
a BIOS as such, even.
Someone told me that MINIX didn't deal with the bios
at all. What about Linux?
How about a TIVO or an MP3 player? Certainly most
video game boxes have the necessary resources (I seem
to recall a web site dedicated to getting early
Xboxes running Linux--it wasn't as simply as you'd
think).
No, but they figured out a way of doing it w/o
cracking the box. There was a couple of games with
bugs that upon crashing (intentionally) made a back
door available. You need some sort of usb device (a
thumb drive was often utilized). Blah blah blah. I'm
going there one of these days. I'm just hoping the
release of the 360 brings down the price of the
original ;). I wrinkled my nose when I found out a
sort of special distro was needed, but I guess the
hardware differed, however slightly, enough from a
vanilla pc to warrant it. There's a kewell book called
"Hacking the Xbox" that goes into different aspects of
reverse engineering. Doesn't deal with installing
Linux too much though.
The TIVO's I looked at didn't use intel procs. I want
to say PowerPC, but it might even be different from
that. And I don't think any (other) game consoles used
an 80x86. The Genesis used the 68000 I know. Show me
wrong if I'm wrong.
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