I recently picked up a Spartan-6 FPGA board from ebay (for $32!) so I thought it would be fun to load the MCL86 core and wire it up to an IBM PC 5150.  The Xilinx Spartan-6 LX9 costs close to $10 which is significantly cheaper than the $150+ Kintex-7.

Voltage dividers were used to translate between 5V and 3.3V and the FPGA’s IO drivers were set to PCI33 so the VCC clamp diodes would be enabled.  Around 10% of the FPGA’s logic was used by the MCL86 which implemented the 8088 Maximum Mode bus interface.

I read that back in the 80’s two software packages were used to judge if a computer was 100% IBM compatible. One was Lotus-123 and the other was Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. I have already run Lotus-123 successfully on the MCL86 but have not tried Flight Simulator until now.  I was not sure which version of the simulator was used, so I tried both!

Here it is:

Please visit us at: www.MicroCoreLabs.com for more information.

We just posted a video demonstration of a Quad Core MCL51 on YouTube:

 

Each core is running an independent application program.

Core-0: Parallel Port Blaster
Core-1: MIDI music player
Core-2: Sine wave generator using a R-2R DAC
Core-3: 115,200 UART Blaster

Four MCL51 8051 cores are instantiated along with a dual 24-bit timer and a UART.

A total of 1227 Artix-7 LUTs are consumed by this quad core processor which is less logic than most single core gate-based 8051 cores!

Please visit us at: www.MicroCoreLabs.com for more information.