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I think the appeal of something like this is that it is at the most minimal practical form. If you want to poke ports and see what happens, this is as close to

by hakfoo 4y ago

I think the appeal of something like this is that it is at the most minimal practical form. If you want to poke ports and see what happens, this is as close to the metal as it gets. There are some interesting compromises relative to a "real" XT or something like the NuXT or Xi8088, that reinforce that near-the-metalness. I have an earlier version of this project. I also have a 386SX clone and an assortment of modern PCs. Even the 386 is orders of magnitude more complex at the hardware-bringup and BIOS level. The 8088, it's all in two files and you can pretty much walk through it by tossing in an occasional call to dump a character to the screen.

rbanffy 4y ago
> I think the appeal of something like this is that it is at the most minimal practical form True, but computer for computer, I'd say the Apple II was much more interesting a machine than the PC. Even the last 8-bit II's could be implemented in generic TTL chips and it offered a nicer bus, and some clever graphics (do you remember any other computer of the time you could shift something half a pixel to the side?). I'll give you that the CPU timing critical Disk II is a pain, but you can always incorporate a pretend SCSI card that maps to an SDcard and host all the software and all the data that was ever used and generated on every Apple II on the planet on a single card.