ghidra-unSP VS elks

I'm actually the guy from that post! Never got DOOM running on the Furby, but I was able to get a custom version of Pong running, with accelerometer controlled paddles.

The CPUs are definitely weird, and I ended up porting Ghidra to support u'nSP as part of that project. https://github.com/SamuelWAnderson45/sleigh-unsp Reverse engineering a CPU was a wildly fun learning experience; still proud of that project.

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.