I can't pick these up for a few reasons (#dayjob and other hobby projects that I don't have enough time/energy to work on properly!), but here's a couple of thoughts that've been percolating for a while that didn't make the last topic:
- If I were a 19-year old (and odd) college student thinking about starting something like this again (I picked up the idea from Alan Cox and did the early versions suuuuch a long time ago now!), I'd have targeted the Pi Pico, and been absolutely estatic when the RP2350/Pico 2 came out.
You could make a pretty interesting 80/early-90's workstation using a couple of rp2350's (one for frontend, the other to run the hacked-up Linux) w/additional SRAM and Flash.
- One can use a 386+ as a memory mapper/protection unit while still running everything the rest of the system in real/v86 mode, in blissful ignorance that it's running on a 32-bit system.