Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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A lot of reasons. I wanted to learn x86, and the original 8088/8086 instruction set is less intimidating than the 4000 pages of documentation the current x86 instruction set possess. Going original 8088/8086 means PC Speaker, Tandy 3-Voice or Adlib are your likely sound options. Then you have 40/80 column text modes, CGA or EGA graphics as your display choices.
Plus I'd been looking for an excuse to buy a NuXT. It's a reproduction Turbo XT using modern-ish parts. So you don't have to fuck around with ancient and failing power supplies, spinning rust drives, 8-bit ISA controller cards, etc. I threw a reproduction Adlib card on there, the Resound-2 from Texelec, and I was good to go. It does use NOS or recovered NEC V20 8088 compatible CPUs, and a Trident VGA chip. Not sure about the provenance of other ICs like memory and such.
Since this is entirely self directed, I had to form some goal for myself. That goal is an Ultima style RPG. So I made an EGA sprite editor first to create my own sprite sheets. Now I'm working on an adlib tracker to make my own music. It's going to be terrible. But it's going to be mine.
After that, I'm probably good to go on the RPG. I'll probably create some more utilities to create the data files for the game world, etc. I have zero to no aspirations of making any money on it. Life may well knock me off track, as it tends to do, and it'll never even get finished. But I'm enjoying myself, learning something new, and trying to keep myself sharp.
Plus I just love working a computer like the clockwork machine it is, instead of fighting through layers and layers of abstractions, and libraries, and networking, and software as a service and configuration management. That's my day job, but this is why I fell in love with computers. It helps me not forget that.
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