@Moon @coolboymew

1. why? apart from being able to use shitty old periphery
2. just use an USB-to-serial adapter
3. why?
4. bioses of the era are all weird, they are the reason uefi exists, i don't think you can use coreboot on extremely old hardware.
5. ide-to-sata might work but old CD-ROMs can be very wonky.
6. i think it will be much easier to use CF as that is already IDE.
7. lol, lmao even
8. yeah that would be nice, but then some older machines had ram cards instead of memory sticks...
9. that'd be pretty nice



my requirements are much simpler

1. any easy-to-maintain solution, i.e. FPGA or Emulation. Real hardware only for periphery that really matters and more or less available, i.e. OPL3 chips. I don't want to deal with disintegrated belts and dead lasers.
2. compatibility with both VGA and HDMI/DP. VGA to connect real CRT monitor, digital as a fallback if either crt or digital-to-analog component breaks.
3. compatibility with modern storage and input methods, while emulating rw times and possibly noise.

So far 86Box is rather sufficient but i haven't really tried it with games and real CRT yet.