New Member VERY hot on 8086's

["jerryc@innerpeace.org" <jerryc@innerpeace.org>]

Greetings,

I'm a brand new subscriber and very interested in ELKS. I scanned and 
read the archives for the past year for what seemed relevant to our project.

We have over 100 free self-help programs and want to make them available 
for old 8086's for jails, halfway houses, shelters, rehab centers, and 
many other places where you wouldn't want to put more expensive computers.

We probably only need a subset of ELKS (or Minix, or FreeDOS, or 
whatever we end up using). We mostly want to echo text to an 80 x 25 
text screen. We don't need to print or access any ports. We don't need 
mouse support (mice would probably disappear in these placements, 
anyway, and they're just something else to break). We looked at the 
Minix utilities and libraries, and they do much more than we need.

   http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/minix.html#utilities

These machines will be set up as dedicated Inner Peace machines, so 
other functions will not be needed. As you know, there are literally 
warehouses full of 8086's all over the world. Many of them end up in 
landfills because people do not know what to do with them. We have a 
good use for them if we can get it working.

Inner Peace is an expert system program for healing emotional pain and 
limiting beliefs. If you do a Google search on "self-help software" or 
"free self-help" Inner Peace comes up first. We get a lot of hits, and 
are well respected, both in the free software and emotional healing worlds.

While the current version of Inner Peace is written in JavaScript, the 
original alpha was written in DOS Batch. Here's the link to it:

   http://innerpeace.org/ip.bat.htm

There were clearly some problems with it, but it shows us what's 
possible. We'd rewrite the code for whatever OS we end up using for this 
project.

We did plan to do this project with FreeDOS, but feel that using ELKS or 
Minix would help in the promotion of linux, and would rather go that route.

In order to get this working, we will need a good 8086 emulator to run 
on current versions of linux. I read you had an elksemu. Does it work? 
What emus would you recommend.

Any help you could be on this would be appreciated. We can do most of 
the grunt work, but we will need some pointers to get going.

For example, is ELKS a better way to go on this than Minix?

Would stripping out some of the unneeded things make it run faster?

Maybe an even smaller subset of ELKS that does one specific function and 
gets lots of publicity would get more support for ELKS.

Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks for your wonderful work, and whatever help you can be on this.

Yours in peace,

Jerry

P.S. Here's the link for the original project. We'll be converting it to 
innerpeace4elks soon, if that's how we end up going.

   http://innerpeace.org/innerpeace4freedos