MiSTer FPGA Forum

On the AO486 core, is it possible to make other emulated hardware with a pi (or other device) like the MT-32?? Maybe the 80487 Math Co-Processor and Video Cards and/or Audio Cards? This could transform the core into a 486DX4-75 from 486SX-33??

My first PC was a 486DX2-50 (from 93-94, DOS 5.0 and Win 3.0 was the current at the time) with a fairly high end video card for the time (it had a whopping 4mb RAM!). But I remember doing things on that PC that the AO486 struggles with like Win95/98 general performance. MechWarrior 2 and Duke Nukem 3D. I played those 2 games a LOT in high school on that 486... I remember the PC being too fast (or too slow with Turbo "on") for Wing Commander. I did drafting on that PC (AutoCAD r12 - r14 and 3D StudioMAX r2) for several years, till I got a P3 when I went to Univ.

-Random Thoughts-
True Story, when I first brought home that PC, I wanted play a game on 3.5" Floppy (B: Drive - My A: Drive was 5.25" Drive, no CD-ROM they were not consumer avail yet).
At the command prompt,

cd b:
Why isn't this working.
eject disk and check it. Blow into it like an NES game. reinsert it.
cd b:
dammit... Ill have to call my fiend tomorrow to figure this out....

Upgrading from DOS 5.0 to DOS 6.2, and losing DOSSHELL.EXE.
The selling point the salesman kept making was it added comas to large numbers. I just wanted DOS Shell back...

The IO port does not have channels available to do anything like a graphic card. The best device for late 486 and pentiums is a modern PC running DosBox. The current A0486 core occupies most of the FPGA and cant be expanded without a rewrite.

Well that sucks.

A 486DX2 class core will only work when a very talented FPGA dev picks up the mantle and codes a tightly optimized CPU/FPU combo plus peripherals. My guess is that this won't happen on MiSTer as AO486 is mostly good enough. MiSTer on the DE10 Nano isn't the final word in FPGA retro gaming though, so maybe on some future platform there will be an interest in (and capacity for) building a more powerful WinTel clone core.

Historically speaking there was quite a gap between the 486SX which is mostly a beefy 386 and a fully fledged 486DX. Your old DX250 ran circles around any SX, which is exactly what you're seeing here.