Happy New Year! The site has a fresh new design. I’ve replaced Hugo with a minimal, custom static site generator that suits my needs much better. Another update: comments have moved from Disqus to Giscus. While Disqus was once a decent platform, it has become overwhelmed with ads. Giscus, on the...
Read more →After 486Tang, I wanted to go back to where x86 started. The result is z8086: a 8086/8088 core that runs the original Intel microcode. Instead of hand‑coding hundreds of instructions, the core loads the recovered 512x21 ROM and recreates the micro‑architecture the ROM expects. z8086 is compact and...
Read more →Since releasing 486Tang, I’ve been working on recreating the 8086 with a design that stays as faithful as possible to the original chip. That exploration naturally led me deep into the original 8086 microcode — extracted and disassembled by Andrew Jenner in 2020. Like all microcoded CPUs, the 8086...
Read more →Yesterday I released 486Tang v0.1 on GitHub. It’s a port of the ao486 MiSTer PC core to the Sipeed Tang Console 138K FPGA. I’ve been trying to get an x86 core running on the Tang for a while. As far as I know, this is the first time ao486 has been ported to a non-Altera FPGA. Here’s a short...
Read more →A year ago, I added a softcore CPU to SNESTang, to make FPGA gaming cores easier to use. Over the past months, this allowed me to implement features like an improved menu system and core switching. While the softcore served its purpose, its limitations—slow performance, inability to handle complex...
Read more →I've recently found myself frequently using the "ChatGPT to PDF" Chrome extension to convert ChatGPT conversations into PDF documents. The Deep Research discussions in particular contain valuable info worth preserving in ebook format. However they lack proper title pages. So here's a quick Python...
Read more →Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter (UART) modules are basic components in embedded systems, enabling serial communication between devices. While there are many free implementations available online, a new challenge arose during my work on the independent software stack for the Tang...
Read more →Today we discuss Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive). The 16-bit game consoles held a special place in game history. After the 8-bit machines became extremely popular in the mid-1980s, companies had more resources to pour into R&D of the next generation, leading to more sophisticated designs. And the...
Read more →GBATang has been improving pretty quickly since its release and just reached version 0.4. More games are running. Graphics rendering has improved a lot. And sound bugs were fixed. Continuing part one, let us discuss the components that were not covered in the first post. Combining FPGA block RAM...
Read more →Here are a few tips and tricks for using the Gowin EDA IDE and Tang FPGA boards, such as Tang Nano 20K, Tang Primer 25K and Tang Mega 138K. These are small things that I wish I knew when picking up the Tang boards. Gowin is a relatively small FPGA vendor and documentation is not that complete. So I...
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