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So I'm covered there. I'll have to see what it is and what it can do. I'm kind of hoping that the guy giving it to us is wrong and that it's a faster chip (like a 386), but common sense tells me that if he knows enough of what a 286 is, then he's probably right.Just look through craigslist. Someone's bound to be giving away something faster, at least as slow as a Pentium. I wouldn't spend a dollar upgrading a 286 unless it was used for something critical.
Yeah, I'll be limited for sure. The bigger issue with Pentiums, however (and most people probably don't know this) is that the more common Roland MT-32 devices tend to have buffer overflow issues because the faster chips dish out the required sysex files (this creates new instruments and sounds on the unit) too quickly for it to react. So a Pentium (unless I had a Roland LAPC-I or CM-32L or 2nd Gen MT-32) would be a no-go for my setup.
EDIT: I should explain. First generation MT-32's required 40ms of wait time in between Sysex messages. Older games are sometimes programmed to go off of the system clock, instead of being properly coded to wait 40ms before each sysex message. Because of this, on a faster CPU like a Pentium, the games bombard the MT-32 with Sysex way too fast, causing it to crash and not load all the sounds correctly. The 286 CPU definitely won't be having this problem. I believe all CPU's up to 486's are okay. Pentiums and higher are the ones that are too fast, and as a result, a utility like Mo-Slow will have to be used to temporarily slow the machine down so as not to cause a crash. Or, in the case of DOSBOX, just slow the emulated CPU cycles down to some stupid low number while the game loads the sounds, and speed it back up afterward.
Its probably one of those combined controller cards that shared a small amount of onboard memory and eventually became our southbridge.
the 286 was my 1st ever CPU. Makes me want to tear up
Loved learning to do protected mode programming on that thing.
You can make .com files really easily using debug since it's a mini monitor/debugger and can convert assembly language mnemonics into machine code*. DOS and BIOS services are made via interrupt calls. 16 bit programming is kind of a pointless exercise and you don't really gain anything that isn't as easy to learn starting with 32-bit/64-bit x86 assembly language.
DEBUG
A 100
MOV AH,9
MOV DX,108
INT 21
RET
DB 'HELLO WORLD!$'
There's not much difference writing directly to b000:0 (or b800:0), but it's kind of pointless for such a trivial program.DOS and BIOS calls are for wennies
The beauty of 16 bit 80286 system programming is the fact that the architecture is simple enough that one can actually program right into the various components of the system.
Never had so much fun as those days
I've done my share of low level assembly programming on a few different architectures.