First post, by aquishix
- Rank
- Member
I'm intensely interested in creating an Intel 80186 based system, but all of the motherboards I've seen for sale thus far appear to be intended for microcontroller applications. That's not surprising, since it seems like the 80186 was mostly used for controller cards/boards of various types. The only 80186 I've ever owned was the brain of an ISA SCSI controller that I acquired a few months ago.
But I'm interested in getting my hands on one for gaming. I would love to get compilers(or assemblers) that work on a 80186 or at least TARGET the 80186 architecture, so I could fix whatever incompatibilities are in the source code and re-compile(or re-assemble) them for the 80186.
Does anyone know what kind of video and sound hardware might be out there that's compatible with the 80186? What about drive interfaces?
I saw someone post a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philips_:YES
But I haven't been able to find any of those (current or Sold) on eBay...so I'm inferring that they're exceedingly rare.
Any information on this insanely niche corner of the vintage computing/gaming space would be appreciated. The 80186 has fascinated me for a while now because it is the most obscure member of the x86 family as far as I can tell.