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Tiny386 on a ESP32-S3

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First post, by douglar

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Developer He Chunhui has turned the humble Espressif ESP32 microcontroller into a fully-fledged '90s personal computer with Tiny386 — a resource-efficient emulator capable of running Microsoft Windows 95 and a range of 16- and 32-bit software packages on the low-cost chip.

"Tiny386 is a x86 PC emulator written in C99," Chunhui explains of the project. "The highlight of the project is its portability. It now boots Windows 9x/NT on MCU [Microcontroller Units] such as [the Espressif] ESP32-S3. The core of the project is a built-from-scratch, simple and stupid [Intel] i386 CPU emulator. Some features are missing, e.g. debugging, hardware tasking, and some permission checks, but it should be able to run most 16/32-bit software." https://www.hackster.io/news/he-chunhui-s-tin … pc-5454cf6e36a1

Reply 1 of 1, by BitWrangler

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I was wondering whether to post about that when I saw it. Seems glacially slow. Like you'd want to treat it more like a VGA XT emulator than a 386 emulator, even if you like SX16s.

In current form it seems tuned to that module with the LCD on.

I was wondering though about using some of the i/o stuff from it to improve the PCXT emulator, proof of concept, that showed up a few years back, that was very limited, could only really show a prompt and that was about it.

Another thought is that just the CPU core could be compiled for an ARM M4 or something of decent speed and used on an accelerator board design for XT and/or 286 class machines.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

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