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Tiny386 emulator turns tiny microcontroller into a full i386 PC — tiny virtual machine can boot Windows 95 and Linux on ESP32-S3 chip

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Tom's Hardware

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AI Generated

Programmer He Chunhui created the Tiny386 emulator, allowing an ESP32-S3 microcontroller board to function as a full i386 PC capable of running Windows 95, Linux, and potentially Doom. The project, Tiny386, emulates the main CPU, x87 floating-point unit, and essential peripherals like BIOSes, VGA cards, IDE disk controllers, and Sound Blaster 16 soundcards. Despite the ESP board's limitations, keyboard and mouse inputs are transmitted to the emulator via Wi-Fi. The emulator, written in C99, includes additional 486 and Pentium instructions for modern OS compatibility, with a core of around 6,000 lines of code. The project is available on GitHub and can be tested through a Webassembly demo or YouTube video.

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