86Box forked from PCem specifically over issues of emulation accuracy. The developers of each had very different motives. PCem was aimed at running a few select games as quickly as possible, while 86Box is aimed at accurately representing real hardware behavior. (I do use past tense purposefully: PCem for all intents and purposes has been abandoned.)
DOSBox is meant to be a lightweight DOS runtime on top of a host operating system with the minimal hardware emulation necessary to accomplish that. Generally it makes running games easier as you don't need to deal with autoexec.bat, config.sys, and all the memory management that comes with real DOS. Under 86Box, your VM is yours to meld in exactly the same way as a real old PC; if you run MS-DOS, that means all the nasty parts come back. (I personally recommend installing Windows 95 at least, running DOS games under 95 tends to be a big relief for these same reasons.)
Due to the nature of the sport (one person in a metal box, pit crews distanced from each other), after an adjustment period NASCAR races happened during the pandemic. To empty stands. The winner would get out of the car and instead of thunderous applause, or boos depending on the driver, there would be absolute silence. The word surreal is overused but it was that kind of experience for the driver and people watching at home.
I ported Forth to a 1980s sampler, so that you could plug a MIDI cable in and run a special terminal program to write Forth programs on its 6809 processor.
It boots off a floppy disk, so it was really just a case of working out where in the ROM and OS disassembly the entry points were, and making it all fit around the assumptions the ROM makes.
This allowed me to make up a diagnostics disk to check the RAM (a whopping 128kB of sample RAM) and IO are working.
I worked at a perfectly reasonable company that was acquired by Oracle. This was in the 2000s. We were working on a big Java project and were using ADF, the "Oracle Application Developer Framework". It was a piece of crap. One time I asked my manager why we were using it and he said that the project would probably fail and if we used something else the higher ups would blame it on not using ADF and fire him, so...
Everyone talks about GenServers and OTP and all that, and that part is great, but what sells it for me is that it's a practical functional programming language. You get 80% of the FP part of Haskell but you don't have to mess with monads. It has tail call optimization which makes it easy to write functions in general, one "function" is made up of several that call each other, much easier to reason about and write. In general code I use what I call the "holy trinity", atoms, tuples and pattern matching.
As for it being fun and addictive, I'm retired. I can write code in any language I want, or don't write at all, and I choose to write in Elixir.
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