It only took me a few days, maybe 20 hours total? ... I started this back in January but it took me a while to capture the videos and write it up since I've been reworking the physical frame to make the monitors fit closer.

1/4 of the time was spent running GDB trying to find the memory locations and work out the encoding scheme.

1/4 of the time was spent getting familiar with DOSBox, building on Ubuntu, and syncing the data around via UDP.

1/4 of the time was spent trying to automate the start up so I didn't need to press a hundred keys manually to configure all the displays each time I restarted it.

1/4 of the remaining time was capturing nice videos and writing it all up :)

I've done hacks like this before ... back in 2000 I worked on the team that built ARQuake but we had source code http://www.tinmith.net/arquake/