Comment on $200-ish laptop with a 386 and 8MB of RAM is a modern take on Windows 3.1 era

• Eldritch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  This is actual hardware. Yes simple arm cores can pretty faithfully emulate much of this. But that’s emulation. These are bespoke devices, built from actual old chips. Offering a level of comparability and predictability emulation can’t always achieve. It isn’t for everyone.

  Adrian Black ended up with a non functioning unit sent to him by a viewer that bought one. The seller rather than pay for postage for the broken one to be sent back to China just told them to keep it and sent them a replacement instead. Adrian ends up troubleshooting and fixing it but you can get a pretty good look at everything going on inside and some of the old chips involved.

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  • h3ndrik@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The M6117C also isn’t the original and not that old. Also the 8MB of RAM aren’t true to the original.

    I’m not sure. I occasionally use emulation. And I think it’s fine. Unless you’re a speed runner and need everything to be exact to the frame timing, you won’t notice. Certainly not for a desktop UI like the Win 3.11 on the photo. I guess it depends on the use-case.

    Something like an ESP32 can also be repaired, replaced, programmed and most of the things a different CPU architecture can do.

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    • Eldritch@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      It is actual compatible hardware though. And the opl chips etc are no longer made.

      For myself emulation and FPGA are fine. But for speed running or any other number of things, actual hardware are important.

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      • h3ndrik@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Agreed. I think most prominently competitive gaming; development where you need to assure it later on actually works as intended on the target platform; and business stuff where parties are obliged by contract to guarantee something works flawlessly and keeps running that way - are good examples.

        That laptop doesn’t look to me like it was intended to do any of that, so that’s maybe why I’m being a bit negative here. It’s cool and a nice idea, though…

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