:
: : It doesn't work because when I wrote it (1987!) you had to
: : look damned hard to find even a 286, let alone anything like
: : a 80386, 80486, Pentium ( -II, -III, -IV, ...). So, it does
: : not understand instructions beyond the 80186 (the 8086/8088
: : with some extensions like PUSHA, POPA, etc).
:
: I guess I'm confused as to why you'd need an emulator, that
: doesn't understand much beyond an 8086, that runs on
: and 8086!

The purpose was as a debugger. Since it was an emulation,
I could do all sorts of fun things, like "stop on memory
reference". Or destroy memory and still have a functioning
debugger. Or use the "W"here command to figure out how I
got to this point in the code. Or "hotkey" out to the debugger
without affecting the program I was debugging. Other debuggers
didn't have capabilities like this until programs like Soft-Ice,
and VIM still has some tricks they don't.

Try to debug a boot record with DEBUG and you'll get nowhere,
because of interrupt vectors being changed and system memory
overwritten. With VIM, it was a breeze.

In fact, I'm still using it, though not as frequenly as I used
to.

: Since you call yourself "oldtimer", I guess you were into
: this stuff in the early days? I learned ForTran in 1971, and
: started with micros in 1977.

Yup. I started with BASIC in 1974 (dialup teletype to a
HP 2000C') (yup, the ' is not a typo).