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(Image credit: Getty Images) Whenever someone has a software hobby project, more often than not, one of their endeavors will be to get Doom running on some odd piece of software, like an ESA satellite . As a welcome change, programmer He Chunhui did something slightly different: they decided to build an i386 PC emulator that runs on a tiny ESP32-S3 microcontroller board. It can boot Windows 95, Linux, and likely runs Doom , too.
The project is called Tiny386, and offers emulation for the main CPU and its optional x87 floating-point unit. A processor does not a PC make, so Chunhui ported a host of basic peripherals from the TinyEMU, QEMU, and Seabios projects: BIOSes and their I/O accoutrements, a VGA card, an IDE disk controller, and even a Sound Blaster 16 soundcard. Given that the ESP board doesn't have usable ports for these peripherals, keyboard and mouse inputs are forwarded to the emulator via Wi-Fi.
The ESP32-S3 -based JC3248W535 microcontroller board that Chunhui used can be obtained for $25 to $30 from AliExpress , and that price already includes a decent 3.5" display. The SoC within has a dual-core CPU, a DSP, WiFi and Bluetooth, and a host of I/O microcontroller connectors of various shapes and sizes. But more to the point, an ESP32-S3 is a simpler device and packs far less horsepower than, say, a Raspberry Pi.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/retro-gaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- 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#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
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