When my crew and I wrote 8088 MPH and Area 5150, we had a secondary goal other than to amaze: It was to spurn emulator authors into improving the emulators. Anyone who grew up with a 4.77 MHz system understands that most emulators just don’t play pre-1985 games very well, as most of them were written for that target speed and are unplayable on anything faster. DOSBox is woefully inaccurate for this era of PC gaming — which is why I think most people are trying to forget it, but that would be a shame, as there are some wonderfully surprising action games for this class of system.

MartyPC rises to that challenge, and because the author is as tenacious as we are, he didn’t stop until it ran Area 5150 perfectly. You can even see it single-stepping through the demo’s bit-banged video mode here:

Viler has an amazing write-up on what MartyPC does well beyond just our demos. Highly recommended reading.

It took 42 years, but we finally have a decent 4.77 MHz 8088 + CGA emulator. And if you’re into that sort of thing, you can even run it in your web browser.