elks VS 86Box

ELKS supported MMU-less operation on 8088 and 80286 machines, but I don't think an ARM port exists: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks

Roughly in the mid-90s I bought at a local surplus store a "Carry 1" industrial 8088 computer which to my surprise I later discovered it could run Linux (ELKS: https://github.com/ghaerr/elks). I ultimately sold it on Ebay because although it was a beautiful piece of old tech, I was struggling to find more space for other things.

Here's one. I had only the central unit, mine had two floppy drives.

I don't think you can replace the OS on these. Unless there is a way to boot them from DOS, but you are looking at 8c086 machine so the choice is limited. Linux or BSD won't work. But ELKS might if it can be made to boot from DOS. Minix 2.02 seems to work.

Yet ELKS works on 16 bit computers with 640k of RAM.

Some small size Linux-like OSes do exist though: one commenter suggested Lunix (which I didn't know, thanks for the link), and a slightly bigger one is ELKS which runs on old MMU-less x86 CPUs. I managed to run it on a 8088 industrial PC ages ago.

https://github.com/jbruchon/elks

I should have a Furby buried somewhere; now that I think of it, it may be the right platform to stick a bigger brain into, make it wireless so that it could be connected to the home IoT network then signal events or alerts.

86Box crashes on startup without showing any message, no matter the hardware or operating system being emulated and 86Box build, either stable, experimental or old/new dynamic recompiler. Created an issue on GitHub but the dev who replied said he couldn't reproduce it.

For emulation, you can look into PCem/86Box

Unsurprising, of the 300 staffing agencies in our area only 23 are actually licensed to legally operate as a service. Trying to authenticate which are "fake" or "real" is a thread most companies/applicants rather not pull.

There is also the fake-hire scam: where staff are lured away with a lucrative compensation packages, data-mined by the competitor, and finally jettisoned before the evaluation period expires (typically 6 to 10 months).

A few infected PDFs from various bad actors are also floating around out there with exaggerated promises.

Keep safe, and note 86box supports read-only backing images and sessions Like Bochs/kvm:

https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

(works on Apple M1 laptops, but is slow)

https://86box.net/#downloads | https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

Features are implemented much, much faster, especially if you use nightly builds. Always adding hardware. You can look at the changelog: https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

Shaders are a rather young feature in 86box and very incomplete (only single pass shaders supported for now). I am not surprised they crash. Please report the bug to https://github.com/86Box/86Box/issues

Another solution is to emulate a win95 old pc. It works great and the compatibility is very very high. Try out 86Box. There is a process to set it up and install Windows, but it is worth it for playing stubborn games.

You want 86Box, a full PC emulator as opposed to a virtual machine.