Small Things Retro

I've spent the last month adding features and improving performance in z486_MiSTer, mostly working through games from the first half of the 1990s.

I released z386, an open-source 80386 CPU core, in May and added the 80386 early-start optimization in June.

When Intel designed the 80386, they gave it a trick for hiding memory latency: Early Start.

This is the fifth installment of the 80386 series.

The FPGA 386 core I've been building now boots DOS, runs applications like Norton Commander, and plays games like Doom.

I'm building an 80386-compatible core in SystemVerilog and blogging the process.

I’m currently building an 80386-compatible core in SystemVerilog, driven by the original Intel microcode extracted from real 386 silicon.

When Intel released the 80386 in October 1985, it marked a watershed moment for personal computing.

Happy New Year!

After 486Tang, I wanted to go back to where x86 started.

Since releasing 486Tang, I’ve been working on recreating the 8086 with a design that stays as faithful as possible to the original chip.

Yesterday I released 486Tang v0.1 on GitHub.

A year ago, I added a softcore CPU to SNESTang, to make FPGA gaming cores easier to use.

I've recently found myself frequently using the "ChatGPT to PDF" Chrome extension to convert ChatGPT conversations into PDF documents.

Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART) modules are basic components in embedded systems, enabling serial communication between devices.

Today we discuss Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive).

GBATang has been improving pretty quickly since its release and just reached version 0.4.

Here are a few tips and tricks for using the Gowin EDA IDE and Tang FPGA boards, such as Tang Nano 20K, Tang Primer 25K and Tang Mega 138K.

Version 0.1 of GBATang is just released.

In part 1, we discussed why we need a softcore for SNESTang, and how it can use SDRAM in a way that does not disrupt the gaming core.