In this series I am building my single board computer with the 16-bit Intel 80188 CPU. It is a spin-off of the Intel 8088, 16-bit breadboard computer.
The idea is to build a complete computer using easily available chips, which means emulating some of the peripherals using modern microcontrollers and thus the computer will not be fully compatible with the original IBM PC.
This series could also be of interest of people learning to use the Raspberry Pi Pico as some of the peripherals will be emulated by this module.
All the source code and schematics for this series can be found on GitHub:
Software used in this series:
GCC IA-16 toolchain or here you can also find the binaries for Windows
Make for Windows (if using Windows)
Visual Studio Code (optional IDE)
KiCad 7 (for schematics)
The Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller talks to the Intel 80C188 as an I/O device using its PIO - Programmable I/O block. You will see:
all my fixes I've made to my Slador188 computer's PCB
how the Pico is connected to the address/data bus of the 80188
detailed explanation of how the PIO programme talks to the Intel CPU via the GPIO pins
how to initialise the PIO and use its interrupts to transfer data between the GPIOs and the ARM core
how to handle the interrupts from the PIO in the C code running on the RP2040 ARM core
the tests where we use the Pico as the Intel CPU's I/O peripheral device
In this video you can see:
how I read data from an SD card using Raspberry Pi Pico
what is the Master Boot Record on a hard drive and what it is for
how a disk is divided into partitions and how BIOS handles it
how the operating system is booted from a disk
my design of a disk controller implemented on Raspberry Pi Pico
how the Intel CPU accesses the SD card via the disk controller