[actionfromafar]

It would be really neat if the emulator had some kind of "escape mode" where it could jump to and run the native instruction set.

It could even be implemented to look like some kind of extension card in RAM. You write native instructions to a piece of RAM and call a special (otherwise invalid) 8086 instruction and the native execution kicks in.

Or if you want to make it more ambitious, create a COM or EXE format which indicates that the instructions are really ESP32 native, but with full access to the BIOS functions with some kind of translation layer.