Sometimes, computers give me a warm fuzzy feeling.
I've been a chess player since I was 7 years old; played competitively for 10 years, and basically quit when I went to university at 19, at an ELO rating of 1850. That's a strong club player level. (Amazing I attained it, because I didn't study a single minute.)
One thing every chess player in the 80's and early 90's wanted was a H&G Mephisto modular chess computer.
Like this one
They were extremely expensive at around fl. 2500. (That would be €1135, which is a lot of money for a chess computer even today, let alone in 1985-1995.)
Now, the software running inside these computers can run on PC's. What? Yes...
Someone has written an emulator for the CPU's that the Mephisto's used (Motorola 68K series), and this emulator is Winboard compatible. Winboard is a protocol that allows chess interfaces and chess engines to communicate. However, the standard nowadays is the UCI protocol... and an adapter Winboard-To-UCI does exist.
So now we have a series of dedicated embedded chess programs, written in 1983-1995, running in a Winboard emulator, with a UCI adaptor stacked on top, so it can be used in a graphical UCI-compatible interface (basically, most interfaces today).
The only gotcha is that you can't see search depth or principal main line, just because the programs at that time didn't output them. (Many chess computers didn't even have displays.)
But still... now I can use my old Fritz 11 interface to run automated engine matches between these old programs AND put them into a big pool of newer chess engines. Remember: those old chess computers were slow (like, 2 to 40 MHz), so the programs will be stronger when running this emulator, just because they can see farther ahead in the same timeframe. I wonder where they fall, compared to PC engines as old as Fritz 5.32 (1997), or weaker current-day engines.
Is this useful? No. But it is a blast to see something from the 80's and 90's revived in such a way, and to have programs like the legendary Roma (Richard Lang) and MM5 (Ed Schröder) play matches against one another, on a PC, 30 years after they were originally written.