Re: cheap PC's

>With all this talk about PC's, I broke down and bought one
>(with my teeth clenched, since i'm a senior engr at Apple)
>Used 386/486's are incredibly cheap in the Bay Area! I just
>found a surplus place that had used mini-towers with everything
>but the floppy/hd for $25 !

Hey, that's a good deal for a 486. We get a lot of weird old 486 stuff
 from Intel showing up in the surplus places around here. There are some
interesting 486 boards with processors for $10 that are EISA, but with
non-PC power connectors...

>So, how do you do embedded systems with these things? I
>assume if you were going to use it for a sound board in
>a game you wouldn't boot DOS on it..

If you have access to Circuit Cellar magazine, they've been going over
using x86 based PC's as embeded systems for about the last year? It's a
nice series of articles starting at ground zero and going up all the way
through the system.

That's for the serious home-brew/custom type person. There's also a pretty
good selection of embeded kernals and OS type stuff that gets the basic
platform ready for you.

For the task at hand, booting DOS might not be too bad if you get sound
card drivers (for a couple different types of boards) for "free". The
memory segmentation crap can be side-stepped with an OK compiler and DOS
extender. I'm sure there are others on this list that know more about this
than I do, but that might get the ball rolling... An 8255 glues to the ISA
bus really easy and makes for a nice little bidirectional I/O Port. (or
just the Parallel port if you don't need a whole bunch of lines)

-Clay

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
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/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
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Received on Tue Jul 8 15:48:10 1997