The IBM PC spawned the basic architecture that grew into the dominant Wintel platform we know today. Once heavy, cumbersome and power thirsty, it’s a machine that you can now emulate on a single board with a cheap commodity microcontroller. That’s thanks to work from [Fabrizio Di Vittorio], who has shared a how-to on Youtube.
The full playlist is quite something to watch, showing off a huge number of old-school PC applications and games running on the platform. There’s QBASIC, FreeDOS, Windows 3.0, and yes, of course, Flight Simulator. The latter game was actually considered somewhat of a de facto standard for PC compatibility in the 1980s, so the fact that the ESP32 can run it with [Fabrizio’s] code suggests he’s done well.
This is excellent work, and while there’s tons of better ways to emulate an old IBM PC, they’re not as cool as running it on a cheap microcontroller.
Slightly off topic, but I see there is a new ESP32 microcontroller based on RISC-V. I wonder if it might be possible to get Haiku running on that?
Haiku allegedly needs a minimum 400MHz Pentium. That has a core mark of over 1,000. The ESP32-C3 comes in at around 400. My guess is this means you need to wait or run it overclocked in a freezer. Would be a very cool machine!
The ESP32-C3 is RISC-V indeed, but it only has one core (instead of the two of the “standard” ESP32) and less GPIO pins. It is positioned roughly between the old ESP8266 and the ESP32: Its greater advantage is its lower cost, but that obviously only comes into play when you need hundreds or thousands of MCUs.