I recall VICE emulating the Brotkasten on 386 PCs some thirty years ago, later UAE doing it for Amiga. How long til my currently running system (anno 2016) is being emulated?
I've been meaning to rediscover the CICA and Simtel collections. Maybe that's what I needed!
The only standout feature is PIO which is definitely interesting but very niche. It's also patented so say goodbye to any portability or FOSS vibes. (If you want a FOSS version btw, check out https://baochip.com/)
If it didn't have the Raspberry name behind it nobody would even have heard of it.
A serious warning: read the RP2350 errata carefully. You may be better off buying old 2040 inventory.
Contrast that with STM32 where you have to constantly reference the data sheet to make sure you're using the correct pins for say, I2C when you're running in a particular mode. And since you're running in that mode, you now can't use other pins for certain things. Ugh! I hate it!
Then there's the issues with picking the right-size part number and making sure the pins you want are 5V tolerant, checking that you're using the correct ADC, and... Ugh! It's a pain in the ass!
Other chips aren't much better as they all have those same problems.
ESP32 is nice because of the zillions of built-in peripherals but configuring the damned thing can get really complicated really fast. It's so complicated, in fact, that they had to make a Makefile (as in `make menuconfig`) that rivals the Linux kernel in the sheer number of options/submenus.
Also this doesn't emulate ISA bus, where one could plug one of those "multi-io" cards to get rs232/printer ports.
Which is a shame. There are plenty of GPIO pins to fit full ISA on RP2350 (at least on "B" variant), and those GPIO are supposedly 5V-tolerant (with sufficiently recent silicon revision). So hardware-wise, it's just a matter of wiring up an ISA slot directly to the RP chip.
Unlikely, virtualization/emulation has been a thing well before this project and you can just buy USB to RS232 adapters. There are GPIO solutions for industrial PCs other than the parallel port. Or you can simply buy new industrial PCs which have those ports.
If you find an industrial appliance controlled by genuine old PC hardware that hasn't been replaced, the RS232 ports are the least of your concerns.
In my experience, such machines usually have something insanely proprietary plugging into a custom ISA card, and whatever is connected to it usually doesn't take too kindly if the bus timings are off. And neither does the accompanying bare metal software that relies heavily on timing loops and hardware peculiarities.
The Pentium MMX with 32MB i replaced it with was MUCH faster, practically everything was instant.
s/technically/allegedly/
supposedly with a minimum of 4M RAM even! [1] I have a machine with twice that clock and twice that RAM that a friends parents wanted to toss out[2]. I spent the better part of a day getting Windows 3.11 and Office 4.3 to run. Playing around with it for a bit, I highly doubt that Windows 95 on minimum requirements would be anything but endlessly frustrating. I was not masochistic enough to try.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements
At least that is what I remember and while that memory might be hazy I know exactly where my precious is.