A couple of weeks ago, I picked up one of these on a whim – it’s got an LCD display, a little keyboard, a card reader, and other crazy things – why not? I wasn’t terribly interested in having to deal with 8051/8031 series programming, however.
A couple of Google searches later, I’m happy to discover that none other than the Atmel ATMega32 (as well as a bunch of other Atmel microcontrollers) is more-or-less pin-compatible with the 8051.
And hey, various and sundry Atmel microcontrollers like the ATMega32 have some compatibility with the Arduino environment I’m familiar with.
Now, obviously, this is all still a bit of a thought experiment at this point – I would need to get an ATMega32 (I’ve had AVRSyn on my to-do list for a while now, so I was going to get one eventually) and some sort of programmer to go further, but it seems like this crazy plan will work with some hacking involved (i.e. the clock crystal would likely have to be replaced too – I’ll have to look at the schematics).