FreeBSD not booting

[Bas]

From a conservation perspective I'm trying to boot ancient x86 operating systems on the ao486. FreeBSD is one of them, but none of the really old ones from the 1.x and 2.x series work. Where to even begin debugging this?

[cursedverses]

Does those versions of BSD need an FPU to run? I suspect the answer will be yes (even the Amiga's *nixes demanded one)

If that's the case, I suspect you'll be short on luck - AO486 doesn't implement an FPU, at least at this time.

[Bas]

These old versions should run on a bare 386. Slowly, but they should run. The FPU requirement came with the 3.x branch if I'm not mistaken.

[Zacpod]

May be the IDE implementation - that seems to be why OS/2 doesn't boot.

[Bas]

That should mean it could run off a floppy. Less than ideal of course but I'm going to look into building a custom stripped-down kernel with the bare minimum of hardware support and see what MiSTer makes of that. Now to test if I can compile FreeBSD 3.0 for i386 directly from a jail on my 13.0-RC2 laptop.

[Zacpod]

Oh... That's an interesting idea! I may do the same with OS/2. Maybe with a boot floppy I'll be able to get a driver to work.
I mean a lot of the reason I got the MiSTer was for retro gaming, and Amiga, and C64, but damn I also really am nostalgic for OS/2.