FWIW OpenWatcom v2 (a fork by one of the original developers who, at least according to the perforce logs, was the most active pre-fork anyway) https://github.com/open-watcom/open-watcom-v2 should also support 8086.

Huh, I'm surprised to find that you're right, unless you count NASM. Randall Hyde last updated HLA in 2015 (and it didn't support the 8086 anyway), WalterBright last updated DMC in 2013, and SDCC doesn't support the 8086. But I remember the 8086 as being a lot of needless effort that we had to cope with because it had a large installed base: near, far, and huge pointers, EMS bank switching, shitty TSRs that would stomp your registers, and so on. MS-DOS made it worse.

What are you up to? Something like https://trixter.oldskool.org/2015/04/07/8088-mph-we-break-al... where the needless effort is the whole point?

GCC is a good choice too for those still.

Also, you can get a version with support even from Mentor at https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/sourcery-tools/sour...

Look at the: > These releases provide cutting edge support for 8088, 8086, 80186 and 80286 processors from the year 1984.

section.