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Comment by kevstev | Hacker News Reader

The silent and really unheralded disappearance of Wintel from my home surprised me a few weeks ago as well. It wasn't a conscious decision, they just got slowly replaced by macbooks, and an ARM based NAS... etc. Kind of like how I also realized I no longer have an optical disc reader... despite still having spindles of very old stuff.

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And this is kind of sad in the context of this post. Because I have always wanted to dive deeper into assembly, and there are loads of material to study X86 assembly out there.

But being able to run it only in a virtual machine, it is a little bit demotivating.

Well, there are some chinese folks selling newly built PC-XT compatible machines on the internet. Maybe I could go this way. And probably, pure, original 8086 assembly is a lot more fun than overly complicated X86_64 with lots of extensions.

There's always arm assembly. It's a differen ISA of course, but a lot of the concepts transfer pretty nicely. You could also look at something like the Zimaboard or similar machines.

If you just want to learn for the fun of it, check out RISC-V instead. It might give you that early days feeling.

I found using qemu to be quite simple and pretty decent. I guess it depends on what you are looking to do- really low level bootloader/OS type stuff or actually explore the instruction set and maybe build something useful. Learning about the BIOS interface was actually quite enlightening, but in general ARM and RISC-V is much less complex.

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