• Alphane Moon@lemmy.worldM
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    11 days ago

    From my research, the best Pentium III debuggers (maybe even the only ones) of the early 2000s were made by American Arium and Applied Microsystems. These ranged from as low as $9k to over $40k USD for some of the Arium units. Allegedly, Intel bound these firms by 10-15 year NDAs when developing these solutions.

    The main customer of these debuggers would have primarily been OEMs performing hardware validation or BIOS/firmware development while stabilizing new motherboards. With a pretty narrow market, there’s no more than a few thousand hardware debuggers of this period produced by either company.

    In 2023 these vintage hardware debuggers seldom pop up, and aren’t bought for much more than $25-75 USD.

    There can’t be very many left and I am assuming you have to be gentle with them.

    I am surprised Intel/Microsoft didn’t release all relevant documentation/code for hobby tinkering. The OG Xbox is almost a quarter of a century old.