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A couple of years ago now, I resurrected an old machine for nostalgia, and to some extent to learn about the system architecture using Assembly language, C++ (for real mode DOS).

Specs:

  • AMD Duron 850MHz CPU
  • 256MB DDR RAM
  • 6GB Hard Drive
  • GeForce 4 MX440 64MB GFX Card (AGP)
  • Creative SB16 (EISA)

Operating Systems:

  • MS-DOS 6.22
  • Windows 3.11
  • Windows 98
  • Windows 2000 Professional

As these old machines were rather bulky, it got me thinking, is there anything of a similar spec, but the size of a Raspberry Pi, or slightly bigger (Mini-ITX) ?

It would be really cool to be able to run all this old stuff on a machine that was really tiny in comparison to the machines of its day, but was still based on technologies from the era (i.e. Pentium MMX, Sound Blaster 16 etc)

I know it's highly unlikely that this technology exists, and I have looked around, but haven't found anything suitable, still as they say: "Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained".

bwDraco
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Matthew Layton
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1 Answers1

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Raspberry Pi can be made to emulate an older x86 box, but you run into problems because the Pi is a RISC processor and the old Intels are all CISC (see here for more details). In doing this just for nostalgia sake, I would recommend setting up a virtual machine which can emulate the old processors just fine. If you have your own disks to reinstall from, you could just grab a general virtualization program like VirtualBox. Otherwise, you might consider using DosBox, which is a project specifically made for retro computing.

techturtle
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