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z386: An Open-Source 80386 Built Around Original Microcode

35 points by wicket 3 hours ago | 7 comments

Tiberium 3 minutes ago

Nice article, I guess GPT 5.x? :) doesn't sound like Claude

Question: Are there today any 386 instances running somewhere in the basement to do some productive stuff, maybe processing only some controller data once a day?

I remember the link some month ago where that one small shop ran completely on an old Amiga (?IIRC, not sure, was linked here)

Around 98/99 I was involved in a small IT-management company serving SME around the region, we had a client producing distinct metal objects with a big press; this got feeded once a day with a 5.25 floppy from another machine with production data - and it was still in use while we had already ethernet/USB/3.5 floppies etc. :-D

bitwize 4 minutes ago

A few years ago there was a story where the single Amiga that ran an entire US school district's HVAC was replaced with a system costing like 1.5 million dollars, after 30 years of dutiful service.

I can't think of examples offhand but you bet your ass there are donut shops and auto body repair services running 386s to do POS, inventory, and the like. Some of them may be driving terminals off Xenix.

cbdevidal 25 minutes ago

Of course they tested Doom :-D

They might also run Linux kernel 3.7, that supported i386. Gray386linux is still maintained, and runs a patched 3.7 kernel.

https://github.com/marmolak/gray386linux

KellyCriterion 16 minutes ago

haha, this was my first thought when I read the headline, because this "classic test" always comes up here :-))

mmastrac 2 hours ago

Did the microcode disassembly find any useful backdoors to read microcode without decapping?

nand2mario 2 hours ago

Not really. The 386 does not have an interface to read the ROM direclty. Instead, it uses the Built-In Self-Test (BIST) to verify the ROM's contents. It's basically a checksum-like mechanism that verify the integrity of the CROM.