Forum: War Ensemble BBS

Even A Cheap Little Microcontroller Can Emulate A 386-Based PC Now

From Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?=@[email protected] to comp.misc on Wed Nov 12 23:48:50 2025

From Newsgroup: comp.misc

This hacker has written a 386 PC emulator, complete with a basic set of
useful emulated peripherals, that runs on a ESP32-S3 microcontroller
board <https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/tiny386-emulator-turns-an-esp-s3-microcontroller-into-a-full-i386-pc-tiny-virtual-machine-can-boot-windows-95-and-linux>.

The entire project has taken about 6,000 lines of C99 code so far.
There are admittedly still some gaps, but so far it is functional
enough to boot Windows 95 and Linux. That even includes a modern Linux
kernel, which no longer runs on an original 386 processor, after the
addition of some 486 and Pentium instruction extensions.
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