SBEMU VS 8088_bios

What about FreeDOS?

FreeDOS with SBEmu is really nice for an instant DOS machine on real hardware:

https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU/releases

SBEMU is a game changer. You can now have sound-blaster support through emulation. It's not perfect but works surprisingly well (https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU)

DOS emulation is not a very battery-efficient way to play '88-98 games on the go, so projects like these seem to cater to that specific need, letting people run DOS natively. The Toshiba Libretto was a nice, small machine, but finding one in good condition is super hard. Toshiba Portégé was another, but after Pentium-II models, they took away the OPL3 card in favor of something more Windows-friendly (AC97), which doesn't have good DOS drivers. Now there's SBEMU (https://github.com/crazii/SBEMU), which can emulate SB/SBPRO/SB16 on top of newer PCI-based sound cards, including AC97 ones, solving that problem. Now it's possible to have sound on a Pentium-II, III, M and Atom machines running DOS, like a Sony Vaio P.

I am not familiar with the sound chip inside this laptop, but i recently discovered SBEMU, it may not be relevant, but it offers another soundblaster emulation option (for the correct hardware).

Just a heads up, it looks like these guys ripped off Serge Kiselev's 8088 BIOS [1].

[1] https://github.com/skiselev/8088_bios

There are at least three "real" 8086 BIOSes-- "real" as in they can work on actual hardware rather than just emulators-- available in source form, which might be worth examining.

https://www.phatcode.net/downloads.php?id=101 -- this is a respin of code that apparently originated in the 1980s in sketchy Taiwanese clones, so I think some of the docs are reverse engineered

http://glabios.org/ is an all-new-still-under-development project, but it works well enough for my hobby usage.

https://github.com/skiselev/8088_bios These are more targeted towards some specific hardware projects (Xi8088/Micro8088)

Obviously, being for a simple 8086 mrans they don't have some of the complex chipset config used in a modern PC, and even stuff like "hard disc support" is outsourced (for that, you might consider stuff like the XT-IDE Universal BIOS)

And another: https://github.com/skiselev/8088_bios