Hacker News Reader

Comment by hulitu | Hacker News Reader

Hm. "Install nix. --disable-shadow". musl. Better run an old distribution. Anyone knows where can i find 386, 486 era computers besides ebay ?

View on HN

Old distribution with old userspace :). I understand that it looks hard. But you can download precompiled kernel and initrd. Yeah, there is only busybox for now.

This might be a case for PCEm.

https://www.pcem-emulator.co.uk

I extensively tested PCem. A lot of the systems do not work. Though i found a Socket 7 Asus Pentium MMX that was able to boot a particular Slackware (10 i think)

Did you locate the full rom set?

I took the ROM set which was referenced, if i remember correctly, on the github page. There were a lot of XT, AT and other machines. My goal was to run an old Slackware on a 486 era machine but all of them hang at boot. The only luck was with the pentium and slackware 10. I would have preffered 7.

I've had no trouble installing various Linux and BSD distros on various 386 and 486 machines in PCem over the years.

PCem was abandoned and 86box is an actively maintained fork that's almost entirely better. Includes an actual UI, too!

PCem recently resumed development.

PCem has a UI, not sure what you're talking about here. It even manages different configurations in its UI, whereas you have to install external apps for that with 86box.

It's also much faster than 86box in my experience.

Right click to do anything with the emulator isn't much of a UI :)

I don't know what you're talking about. Right click doesn't do anything in PCem.

The UI I'm talking about is the configuration manager where you create and configure virtual machines. When you start a machine there's not much UI except for menu bar at the top.

Since when does it have a menu bar?

Since forever? I mean even the old Windows XP screenshots from the website have it.

http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/screenshots.html

> Anyone knows where can i find 386, 486 era computers besides ebay ?

Older businesses and factories. I saved tons of 386/486/pentium stuff form my workplace. Though I was lucky because my predecessor was a pack rat and never threw anything out.

There are hundreds of thousands if not more chugging away in the embedded world. And there are still many running in less developed countries.

Tons and tons. And they won’t be going away anytime soon.

Use qemu, -cpu 486, -vga cirrus, -soundhw sb16

But this emulates 486 systems and not precisely. For example, endbr32 instruction is not a problem under emulation but it's real issue on real i386/i486 hw. Simply because real 386/486 cpus doesn't support multi nop instructions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com