A PCS 286 in an afternoon, with AI

In the previous post I wrote about how much I missed my 286. This is what happened next.

An afternoon with AI

In the summer of 2026, with AI on the rise, I wondered again what had become of those attempts to emulate the Olivetti PCS 286. I found closed forums, inactive threads and scattered clues. A document on the Internet Archive about one of the machine’s main chips gave me a starting point.

And I thought: could I put it together with the help of AI?

I started with MiniMax.io, with M2.7 and then M3. They were very quick at producing something that worked, even if it was held together with workarounds. In one afternoon, starting from 86Box, the PCS 286 came to life.

It was a kind of Frankenstein: an external VGA card, a not very faithful IDE disk, components that weren’t the original ones. But the BIOS didn’t care what was connected as long as it answered the same way. Seeing an emulator behave just like the physical unit, after so long, was the push I needed.

Earlier work

I’m not starting from scratch. In 2021, EngiNerd89 published an implementation of the PCS machines and the IOC02 controller in 86Box. Don Rizzelli shared photos, information and files of the PCS 286 on the Internet Archive.

I also saved the reference to ruben_balea in a PCem thread about the first PCS machines, although I haven’t been able to recover the full thread.

The rest is in the next instalment :-)