June 3, 2026
Disk drama never dies
CP/M-86 & MS-DOS Cross Development Environment
Retro coding fans turn one hobby project into a full-on old-school tool showdown
TLDR: A hobbyist released a modern-friendly setup for making programs for a very old PC operating system, and the community immediately turned the comments into a retro tool swap meet. The big story is how fast fans showed up with rival emulators, extra downloads, and “don’t miss this” recommendations.
A delightfully nerdy project to help people build software for CP/M-86 — an old operating system from the early personal computer era — could have stayed a quiet niche upload. Instead, the community instantly turned it into a retro-dev recommendation war, with commenters piling in to say, essentially, “Cute setup, but have you seen my emulator?” The project itself is a giant toolbox for writing old-school programs in C, assembler, and Basic using a mix of vintage Microsoft, Digital Research, and emulator tools, all wrapped so modern Mac and Linux users can play along. It’s half software release, half time machine.
But the real action was in the replies. One commenter jumped in with a fresh plug for a new CP/M-86 emulator at emu2-cpm86, which gave the thread instant “drop your build” energy. Another commenter came armed with even more links, pointing people toward extra tool collections and compiler bundles, turning the post into a crowdsourced retro treasure map. The strongest vibe wasn’t outrage — it was competitive generosity: everyone seemed desperate to prove they know the coolest forgotten corner of 1980s computing.
There’s also a mild undercurrent of classic retro-computing chaos: licenses, patched tools, missing pieces, and lots of “use at your own risk” energy. That only made the comments feel more charming. The joke practically writes itself: modern developers argue about cloud stacks, while these folks are passionately remixing software old enough to need a Y2K-friendly patch. Honestly? Iconic.
Key Points
- •The article describes a personal cross-development environment for CP/M-86 that can also use DOS-based tools to build DOS programs.
- •The environment supports C, assembler, and Basic, including K&R C and near-ANSI C via different Aztec C compiler versions.
- •It references CP/M-86 source materials from cpm.z80.de and a cleaned-up cpm86-kernel distribution on GitHub for virtualized use.
- •The toolchain includes components from Digital Research, Microsoft, NASM, emu2, and tnylpo, with some tools patched or rebuilt for emulator compatibility.
- •The article includes licensing notes for the referenced tools and a script mapping that wraps the utilities in a bin directory for direct command-line use.