Compact, Fully stocked 486 PC in FPGA
In my previous posts about retro computing, emulation, and FPGA, I realized many of the folks reading this will not have any fond memories of the 8-bit era because you have to be old like me to have any nostalgia for them.
Lots of 90s kids though cut their teeth on the golden age of PC gaming.
DOSBox used to do the job ok, but the ao486 core on MiSTer by Sorgelig has had many new features and performance added, and it has become a great alternative to having original hardware.
My first PC was a 286 with 12mhz and 1mb of RAM. I loved that rig and learned Borland/Turbo C and some assembler (starting with using Debug!). It even had a monochrome monitor. This FPGA implemented specification is a marked improvement over that little guy!
From an educational point of view, there is a real simplicity benefit to learning to code on a pre-3D GPU, pre-windows 10 environment. While object-oriented programming and event-based systems are extremely valuable, starting out in classic K&R vanilla ANSI C, 8086 calls, DOS etc, gives a solid foundation.
The main upgrade to the core has been the implementation of some smart caching, so it can now reliably run games such as Doom 2.
Features:
- 486DX33 performance (closer to 50mhz in benchmarks currently)
- 256MB RAM (configurable)
- SVGA with up to 1280x1024@256, 1024x768@64K, 640x480@16M resolutions
- Sound Blaster 16 (DSP v4.05) and Sound Blaster Pro (DSP v3.02) with OPL3 and C/MS
- High speed UART (3Mbps) internet connection
- MIDI port (dumb and fake-smart modes)
- Dual HDD with up to 8GB each
- Shared folder support
You can grab the core and ROM files directly from the repo then keep track of betas here.
Set up your brand-new MiSTer using the easy-install files linked from my MiSTer FPGA installation guide video first.
There are freely shareable, legal virtual drive files here kindly created by a MiSTer forum user called Kasper.