2026-10-31 19:34 UTC
So what's the plan?
Well, my thoughts are to instrument an existing emulator (probably 86box, as it has explicit modelling of a 286), and dump the descriptor tables from a running system, in various environments (Windows 3.1, OS/2, Xenix, Minix, any other protected-mode 286 applications I can find)
This will give us a foundation of sensible descriptors to create randomized tests against.
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@gloriouscow@oldbytes.space 2026-10-31 19:40
We do want a a healthy percentage of failures, of course. Knowing when to fail a protection check is probably more important than knowing when to pass one. I'll probably aim for 50% protection check pass/fail. I don't know. I pull this stuff out of my butt. Once we have the technique down, it's going to be fairly trivial to extend it to finally make 386 protected-mode tests, which will make everyone very happy