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Comment by selcuka | Hacker News Reader

Curious. Why do we need an actual 8088? Aren't all x86 processors backwards compatible with 8088/8086? Also last time I checked VGA cards supported legacy modes such as CGA, and EGA (this may not be the case anymore).

Any modern Intel laptop should be able to run the same software, without emulation.

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The end goal of this product isn't to run software, it's to hold a piece of history in your hands and play with it and revel in that feeling.

I get it, but this is not a piece of history per se. It was manufactured last week. Like any other x86 laptop.

Well the CPU and peripheral chips are historic.

Any modern Intel laptop should be able to run the same software, without emulation.

Unfortunately not, UEFI-only BIOSes and locked-down bootloaders are a thing today.

This is x86, not ARM.

If you aren't booting quite literally whatever the hell you want you aren't x86'ing right.

Is there something wrong with using a VM?

In theory, no, but if you're using an AMD Ryzen CPU, there's some nasty bugs related to VME instructions (which AMD appears to have no intention of fixing) that break some DOS-based applications, including Windows 3, 9x, and probably the other DOS-based Windows versions as well but I never tried them. NT-based Windows works, though early versions do not perform as well as they do on Intel (my R7 1700 and 5700X run Windows 2000 VMs worse than my old i5-6600...I wish I was joking).

Good to know! You could run qemu without hardware virtualization. For old apps, I doubt you'll notice the performance loss.

Yes. The emulation is not even 80 % acurrate. Especially keyboard interraction is problematic. Then the VM seems to stutter.

There are subtle differences with newer CPUs such as: the 8086 does not AND shift operands with 31 while the 80186 and newer do. Not sure if it matters much for compatibility, just some trivia.

Source: 80186 hardware refence manual, appendix A "Differences between the 80186 family and 8086/8088"

The OPL3 addon is a nice addition that doesn't work on new hardware without emulation.

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