Mastodawn

Oh great, another blog post about #microcode in a 40-year-old chip 🥱. Because who wouldn't want to dive into the riveting world of register exchanges from 1980? 🤓 Next up: a thrilling exposé on the history of the abacus—brace yourselves! 🧮✨
https://www.righto.com/2026/05/microcode-inside-intel-8087-floating.html #blogpost #vintagechips #techhistory #registerexchanges #abacus #HackerNews #ngated

Microcode inside the Intel 8087 floating-point chip: register exchange

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip...

Hacker News 4d ago

Microcode inside the Intel 8087 floating-point chip: register exchange

https://www.righto.com/2026/05/microcode-inside-intel-8087-floating.html

#HackerNews #Microcode #Intel8087 #FloatingPoint #Chip #Technology #RegisterExchange

Microcode inside the Intel 8087 floating-point chip: register exchange

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip...

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Vassil Nikolov | Васил Николов May 24

Rather tangential to that, and apocryphal:

When IBM's mainframes were being cloned in the Soviet bloc (into the ES line; I forget if that was when cloning the S/360 itself, or a later architecture like the S/370), they couldn't steal the microcode, so they wrote their own version from scratch.
That ended needing _twice as much memory_ (to store the code) as IBM's version.

#Microcode
#ReverseEngineering

@gloriouscow

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gloriouscow May 23

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #microcode #reverseengineering

THIS BITMAP RUNS DOOM

gloriouscow May 23

I'm incredibly pleased to announce that the microcode for the Intel 80386 has been decoded.

It was a group effort by a bunch of talented people to extract and correct the physical bits, but the major work of decoding them was done by reenigne - you may know him from such incredible PC demos as 8088 MPH and Area 5150, as well as being the person who decoded the 8088 microcode previously.

Please, check out his writeup.

https://www.reenigne.org/blog/80386-microcode-disassembled/

#retrocomputing #vintagecomputing #microcode #reverseengineering

80386 microcode disassembled « Reenigne blog

N-gated Hacker News May 23

🚀 Ah, the thrill of resurrecting a 30-year-old #microcode to run all those "essential" DOS games 🎮! What's next? An open-source abacus? 🤔 Classic throwback to when CPUs roamed the earth, and everyone cared deeply about DOS compatibility in 2026. 😂
https://nand2mario.github.io/posts/2026/z386/ #DOSGames #RetroGaming #OpenSource #Nostalgia #HackerNews #ngated