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MS-DOS on an Ancient Heathkit H8 computer using an 80186 CPU Board
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ธ.ค. 2023
- Did you ever wish your vintage H8 8-bit computer ran MS-DOS? Probably not... but what if you did? In this video, I upgrade my H8 computer from its stock 8080 CPU to a 16-bit 80186 CPU. This is an upgrade from 2MHz to 25Mhz, and an increase in the memory bus width from 8-bit to 16-bit. The retrobrew SBC-188 was the basis for this design, which I modified to use the 80186 with its 16-bit data bus, and glued it to the Heathkit H8 "Benton Harbor" bus. In the video I demonstrate integration with some of my other boards, including an SP0256A-Al2 speech synthesizer, a VDIP1 USB module, and an H8-4 serial board. Some DOS software works fine, but some software will require true IBM PC compatibility and not work so well. Oh, and we die in Zork and play some Galactic Warezone too! For more vintage computer videos, see www.smbaker.com/
I had an H8 pretty early on. We had a lot of fun with it. Wrote and sold a bunch of software for it. Vised, Tproc, and many others. Years later I got a call one day from someone looking for a memory board for one and I sold them the whole system. Had a third party 64K dynamic memory board for it that we built up from parts. Fun times. To play with old machines I recently picked up a PiDP-11/70. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ can run the 11/70 emulation at full speed while being mostly idle. Brings it into crisp focus just how far we've come. Enjoy!
The Tandy 2000 was the CAD and spreadsheet powerhouse of the early 1980s. It absolutely lapped IBM's offerings in terms of processing speed and graphical capability for the first few years of its life, and its ability to do 640x400 with 8 colors meant that Microsoft chose it to develop color graphics for Windows 1.0.
I had a Tandy 2000 and used it for school papers and such. My dad knew how to score them for cheap once Tandy put them out to pasture. It's the first machine I programmed Lisp and x86 assembly on. One was used as a prop in Season 4 of Stranger Things.
Thanks for the video. The 80186 was in the RM Nimbus computer used in some British schools. The made the 380Z and 480Z systems before that one.
Get this: Had an original pocket computer, 1408 bytes IIRC, then played with a zx81 while on vacation. Bought a TI99/4a, worked for RS, bought a Coco3, also got the PEB for the TI, a 'clone' and yes, on a pedestal, standing proud a dual 720k floppy Model 2000 _with a mono monitor_ for the low low sell out price and employee discount price of $491 canajian bux. Professionally, operated Sys3, A36, AS400, DEC, Unix, Sys38. Left that behind and moved to the southern hemisphere. It was all the toys, OS9 and multiuser madness. I bought the graphix board for the Tandy 2000 as well, but never a specific CM.
A couple of months ago I had a few boards fabricated that used the 80C186EB25. They were spare parts for an embedded controller that was developed in 1992. It was used for industrial ultrasonic testing. The components were mostly in stock at suppliers, the rest were in our regular stock. It was programmed in assembler and C, no MsDos. Introduced in 1990, it was an easy device to design with, 16 bit 25Mhz with most peripherals integrated. Intel called it an embedded processor. Now using Zilinx Zynq which is an FPGA with integrated dual core processor 667Mhz.
For my first job as a network administrator I used a 80186 DOS based sever. We ran a 3Com's 3+Share Network Operating System running on their custom server hardware, which I believe was named “3Server”. This custom hardware was a headless system with no video monitor that used the Intel 80186. It was a very solid and stable platform that interconnected many IBM systems using thin coax which hung off media converters so we could use the twisted pair already existing for our phone systems to connect up the network. Pre 10 BaseT standards all running using 3Com proprietary hardware. Was pretty cool stuff for the time, 1993 ish.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Server
I didn't own a Tandy 200 back in the day, but I own two now that I'm restoring.
In 1985 they sold some 80188 system dirt cheap at local stores, a complete system with Keyboard, 2x400kByte Floppy, Mono-Screen with 90x32 characters for 600DM. They could run CP/M and MSDOS but weren't compatible to the PC so their use was very limited. Honestly, the only person who was happy with that beast was the Grandpa of a friend who used it as an glorified type writer, mostly running CP/M, also we kids were allowed to write some programs for school in gwbasic and turbo pascal 3. In Hindsight the screen might have been in fact a Terminal because it was tremendously slow.
There was also a bunch of Basic-Games but given we already had C64 we kids didn't look much into it. But the screen was nice anyway, 90x32 in crisp clear letters.
I really enjoy your videos, very unique and in depth!
Thank you!
FWIW, the HP 200LX uses a CMOS 80186 processor too, with additional peripherals integrated on chip.
BTW, the 80186 was used as an I/O controller on Radio Shack Model 2 and Tandy Model 12.
The 80286 was the main CPU.
Heathkit ROCKS. taught me Boolean as a 2nd language
I really enjoyed this video. I found about the 80186 processor used in a Tandy 2000. As another posted below it used an 80186 processor. The machine being MS-Dos compatible but not IBM compatible. I was told an easy way to tell if I machine was IBM compatible if the machine ran dos 2.2 (something like that) probably wasn't IBM compatible. Interesting to see dos 3.3 running on it. I'm playing around with caldera multi user dos. Using programs like Word perfect 5.1 works fine on a terminal but if you need graphics. Forget it.
The only time that I saw a '186 in the wild was in the Allen-Bradley PLC5/15. Slow as a fat boy on a bicycle. :) Compared to the even older GE Series Six the AB PLC5/15 was probably about five times as slow (and the GE S6 used four individual 4-bit AMD processors to make up its 16-bit PLC).
I had all but forgotten about that CPU. :)
Great information and video…
… I would recommend, though, for you to look into the camera lens. As this video appears, we the viewers are left wondering who you are talking to…
Thanks for the tips!
Gee, I watch a video made for TH-cam , and have NO problem realizing he is talking to ‘me’, the TH-cam ‘viewer’.
YMMV
@@ernestgalvan9037 … Don’t be an idiot. OF COURSE we know who he’s talking to. I was being descriptive and making a point! One needs to only look at what SUCCESSFUL TH-cam channels are doing in this arena, and then compare and learn. CONSTRUCTIVE FEEDBACK is HOW WE ALL GET BETTER. This channel hasn’t taken off yet, but it COULD…
I had an 80486 in the early 90's. But, so miss my H-8! Flea-Bay wants waaaay to much for an H-8 now. Greed rules, unfortunately.
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Glad to see you back, Sam.
If you had one for sale, would you give it away for 20 bucks or would you charge as much as Simone was willing to pay? Somethings worth whatever someone will pay for it.
@@michaelmichalski4588 - My wife through it away while I was a trip! I would still have it otherwise, Damn It!
Cool! I actually do own a 80186 system, not a Tandy 2000, but a Telenova Compis.🇸🇪
Now that's very interesting -- an 80186 computer with CP/M-86 in ROM. Wish I had one of those :D
I was given some computers 30 years ago and a Tandy 2000 was one of them. It was an odd ball of a computer. Needed a special version of DOS. It had 768KB of RAM, single floppy drive and a 10MB Hard drive. I had to toss it out when I was moving out of my parents house 20 years ago. By then the hard drive is no good. The only thing I ever used the Tandy 2000 for was a serial terminal to my beowolf cluster I built out of a stack of IBM PC330s.
I owned a Tandy 2000, used it for years. Eventually maxed out the RAM, and installed upgraded video.
Sadly destroyed during a massive thunderstorm (flooded out).
Ran Radio Shack DOS, Tandy Zenix, and OS CPM.
Loving your work,
I was eyeballing your address demultiplexing logic and realized if not directly it might be useful making projects for the ibm5140, the external connector is multiplexed very much like this '186 its likely the borrowed ideas when making it because the 5140 uses a fully static core '86 for deep sleep. If you could take a peek at the 5140s expansion port and let me know what you think that'd be super cool.
Great project, wonderful video !
No experience with the 5140, but I'll keep an eye out.
I shortly used Nokia Mikromikko 2 with 80186 and Nokia MS-DOS 2.x at school.
my old employer built 80186-based systems which finally hit end-of-life while I was still working there in the 00s. strangely I also found an H8 carcass in the junkpile there, but it only had the power supply and an I/O board in it. I don't think the two were related, and suspect the H8 may have been used for running CP/M.
neat that you have a BIOS and can run DOS on the 80186. I always wondered what the restrictions were on "PC-like DOS-compatible" systems as some of the software I used growing up had settings to run in a "compatibility" mode which I assume used BIOS calls for everything instead of touching hardware directly, and would probably run fine on your system. 25MHz seems plenty fast for 16-bit DOS programs.
Great video.
I had an 80186 AND an 80188 that were, ironically, on a printer interface card for a fairly large laser printer.
It was a pretty fast setup too. Kept it for a while until the shear bulk of the thing prevented me from moving into a place.
Dang, I should send you my HeathKit H19 (I think? I'd have to go look) terminal.
Some repair um... required. I got it with a pile of other antique 8 bits, never touched it.
What about building a H8 with an AMD A10-7800k or A10-7850k which brings out connections for feeding a VGA and HDMI connections for a VGA display or TV as the VGA Adapter is inside the AMD A10-7800/A10-7850k, but system will need 32GB of RAM.
It is unfortunate that the INTEL 80187 is not around anymore as they have been recycled into Gold maybe I am wrong.
What is the significance of the alphanumeric display? What do those numbers represent?
0-F. Hexadecimal
(Base16)
The display can be switched between octal and hex. They represent exactly the same thing, though the octal display is in base-8 whereas the hex display is in base-16. In general what's running on the monitor throughout the video is an examination of memory at 0040:00D0, which is where I put a counter that increments each time the display is updating. Hence it has a nice counting effect.
Oh Why did we ever upgrade ?, a Example ...