A Software Safari in the Land of Intel

I think I seriously Crossed the Streams … and I liked it.

My favorite Tetris game is from the ~1990 MS Best of Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.x. It runs well on Windows 98 SE and even on Windows 7, but forget about it about on Windows 10. (Windows 10 doesn't do 16 bit apps.)

Unfortunately, I haven't had a machine on my desk which will run Windows 98 (real, virtual, or emulated) since I switched away from my Intel-based iMac to the Mac Studio two years ago.

Until now. (And no, I didn't buy an obsolete Intel box on EBay.)

The x86 emulator Bochs is described as the slowest of the popular emulators because it's the most accurate; I'll take that trade off. I installed Bochs on a Raspberry Pi 4B. Suffice to say having the 4B emulating processors popular 26 years ago (~12 iterations of Moore's Law) might be heavy lifting, but the machine is up to it.

So I now have Tetris (and Solitaire and …) on Windows 98 SE on an emulated Pentium MMX host on Bochs on X Windows on Linux on an ARM single board computer. I actually installed most of the games I had in CD images on disk; testing will continue. :-)

Footnote: The 2 GHz 8GB Raspberry Pi 4B with a 512 GB SSD is the size of 5 stacked CD classic jewel boxes.