After the Olivetti PCS 286 came the PCS 86 and the PCS 386SX. Every manual led me to another model and every BIOS left me with a new question. I hadn’t finished one machine before I was on to the next, following the thread of some forum.
From MiniMax to Codex
I started with MiniMax (I write about that first afternoon in another post). It was fast, but not always accurate, and it was especially creative at inventing solutions and workarounds. I moved to Codex and ChatGPT and, in my experience, they got it right more often. I started cross-checking documentation, reviewing approximations and checking what each machine actually did.
A system of skills
I built skills for each task. A skill is a set of reusable instructions I give the AI for a specific task, so I don’t have to explain it every time. The first one looks for all the documentation on a machine: firmware, manuals, schematics for each component, references, software and links to forums. Everything is stored in that machine’s folder.
I built another one to audit all of the above, with hashes, dates and changes. I also use it to audit the machines; that way I know what each one has and what it’s missing.
Another one creates each machine’s page from the information gathered and translates it into five languages.
Before I knew it, with this system I had more than twenty machines emulated in very little time, not all of them complete or equally good. I didn’t want to leave it in a drawer, and that’s where BluMach came from.
What comes next
My original idea was to list all the summer’s machines here. In the end I’m not going to say how many there are in total: I’ll announce them with each update.
The first public release, focused on the PCS machines (PCS 86, PCS 286 and PCS 386SX), is covered in BluMach 0.1.0-alpha.1: the first version you can try. The second alpha added the Olivetti M15 and the Toshiba T series: BluMach 0.1.0-alpha.2. The priority now is to test more configurations and explain their limitations.