Hi everyone, after months hesitating because the scale of the project, while writing a game engine in C/C++ with SDL2, I twisted a bit the path.
I still had this personal goal of making games in archaic systems, as I said before in this same forum months ago (Gamedev on Windows 9x and MS-DOS.), and began writing a tiny API as proof of concept: It worked.

It is being built over SDL2 and Allegro 4.2.2 xc (a repository of Allegro focused in supporting MS-DOS) while writing the proof of concept.
But as soon as the state of proof of concept finishes, I will start a process of independence from SDL2 and Allegro, so every platform is covered with its own code, potentially targeting more systems that aren't computers specifically.

The full game engine project is called Nadia (it is available in GitHub at dev-marieclaire/Nadia, and the compatibility layer is still in the dev branch), in honour of the great french musician Nadia Boulanger, who was known for being an excellent music teacher; and since this project is teaching me a lot about software architecture, I found the name really fitting, also, it is comfortable to type in a qwerty keyboard.

Nadia isn't trying to compete with giants like Unity, Unreal or Godot in terms of scale, nor with SDL2, SFML, Allegro and other popular C/C++ libraries.
Nadia is not intended to be a technical showpiece (there are plenty of those in the vast ‘internetwork’). Nadia aims to address an unmet need in a niche area: accessibility for development on archaic systems without having to restructure the logic or port the code.

Currently, I am writing an extense documentation on how the most popular operating systems (from the old and current era) work so I can make this HAL a real thingy.
Finally, I'm in search of contributors, because I couldn't find any at my university or Discord (a lot of people aren't into retro dev or are busy attending other stuff), and the scale will be really big for a single IT undergrad like me.

If someone wants to support the development, (not just code, research, testers or just guidance from a more experienced dev are also helpful), just mail me (marieclaireisabelle@tutamail.com) or send me a message to Discord (frommage_triste) or Signal (R4nAMp4_Y2k), your choice.

I hope this project attracts attention so that, in the future, people (and I) can use it to create some commercial video games for MS-DOS/W9x without needing to write a port or a huge change in their codebase for modern systems.

Thanks in advance for the attention. The mere existence of this forum website is helpful for research.