I have been struggling to find a method to actually run any assembly code on my 8086 chip. I have an 8086 chip and I am trying to implement it on hardware to power up a LED or anything simple.
On Proteus's simulation, this is easy to do because Proteus offers you to write code on run directly inside the simulation.
However, in the real world, I cannot find any clue on how to do this. How to upload that ASM code on the chip in order to power up a LED or something?
The 8086 in itself doesn't have any memory, so you can't upload anything to it. You need to build a whole x86 computer with that chip in its core and then put a program in memory at the position the CPU fetches the first instruction, and then let the CPU run.
If you go to the Wikipedia page for the 8086 you'll see that the 8086 is missing a lot of the things built in to modern CPUs, and needs separate chips so it can clock itself, handle interrupts, have any main memory, communicate over a serial line, or in any way interface with peripherals. So, the 8086 is a very complicated starting point if you just want to build something where you can upload some program to run.
You're essentially in need of building a minimalist clone of the original IBM PC!
If you instead of a 1970's microprocessor went for a 1980s (or better, later) microcontroller, you would have a chip that has the CPU, the main memory, the permanent memory, interrupt controllers, clocking circuitry, IO controllers and serial interfaces all built in. To that you could then upload a machine code program directly.
As to what you can do to learn the software side of things while you build your IBM PC, you could use an IBM PC emulator to run the binaries that come out of your assembler. It might be easiest to instead of bare metal binaries to produce normal DOS executables in the COM format, using a C compiler or an assembler of your choice, and running it from the DOS prompt in the emulator.
You need to attach something to the CPU memory bus at specific starting location from where the CPU can fetch program code to execute.
For the 8086, it starts executing code from memory address 0xFFFF0 after reset, that is 16 bytes below the end of the 1 megabyte address space.
As the 8086 has a 16-bit data bus, you need to have e.g. a 16-bit memory chip, or two 8-bit memory chips, programmed with the code you want to run. Flash chips are programmable, and you can simply make just enough code to allow transferring code from somewhere else to be run in the system.
The 8086 loads an instruction from the Data memory space after it completes its power on and reset is deasserted. This instruction is the first instruction of whatever program or bootloader you want to run.
The I/O is typically a 16bit parallel ROM and the enable line from the ROM needs to be the I/O enable line from the 8086. It could be an EEPROM or whatever.
The Prentice-Hall book The Intel Microprocessors is a good resource.
I once wire wrapped an 8088, which is slightly different than an 8086. The first thing I did was wire wrap RAM and ROM chips and their enable line. Then loaded a small assembly program on the flash and test some I/O and the RAM
If you want to go really old-school, have a bank of switches and a circuit to copy the switch state into a register, and another to copy the switch state into the RAM address specified by that register. See CONSOLE ENTRY SWITCHES on page 30 of this document for how it worked on the IBM 1130. In Load mode, Load IAR set the Instruction Address Register, while Start wrote the switch state to memory.
