Updates and News About The 8088 SBC Project

Update on 4-14-04

I have wired up the main CPU board. It contains:

• The 8088 processor and reset/clock circuitry.
• Address and data decoding logic for memory and I/O.
• An 8K SRAM chip
• An 8K EPROM chip
• An I/O Header to connect an expansion I/O board.

The approach being taken is to put the core CPU functionality on the main board and set up a 'standard' I/O header to plug expansion boards onto. This will enable me to reuse the main CPU board for multiple projects involving differnet I/O configurations.

It is all very non-standard at this point.

The decision has been made, at least for now, to work entirely within a single 64K block of memory. I'm sort of pretending we still live in the 8 bit world of 16 bit address busses. The address bits above 16 are being ignored, which makes it easy to work out the memory segmentation scheme for software (just ignore segments for now).

Updated schematics on the way eventually. And a photo of the wired CPU board.

Back to updates page

Back to main 8088 page