[TacticalCoder]

> Anyway, I could just be emulating it instead (lol).

Yeah I'm wondering about that too. I'd say there's something special about using the real thing: have the old hardware working.

Ideally in a 100% real time-capsule mode: say a Commodore Amiga back then didn't have a "Vampire 8000 GTX Turbo 16-valves" accelerator. My machines are all pristine time capsules, not polluted by modernity.

But as you wrote: at some point something fails. And what do you do then?

I understand the appeal of "fake IDE disks" and "fake floppy drives" etc. but if it's to use stuff emulating part of the real thing, why not just use an emulator emulating the entire real thing?

It's not a criticism: for example I've got a real vintage arcade cab and more often than not the "PCB" that's plugged in is not a vintage PCB (even though I've got several of those) but a Raspberry Pi with a Pi2JAMMA adapter. And once a game is launched, you can't tell the difference: it's basically cycle-perfect emulation.

Something something about the ship of theseus and all that.

[drivers99]

Good points. I'm leaning towards keeping it original. For example, I recently got an 8-bit VGA card for it and did some VGA assembly code on it, but then I put the original CGA card back in, even though I have to use a couple external converter boards to actually view the CGA output on a VGA monitor. Having a 90s/2000s era MS-DOS computer for that would be better.

[anthk]

Disks rot with ease. Having an IDE->CF adapter for old computers it's almost mandatory today.