adriancable

8086tiny

Assembly2015–2024

adriancable / 8086tiny

8086tiny

Official repository for 8086tiny: a tiny PC emulator/virtual machine

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9Distinct people

9Mentions

1Explicit recommenders

1.1KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Official repository for 8086tiny: a tiny PC emulator/virtual machine

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

> edit: By the way, if you download 2013.tar.bz2, I highly recommend checking out the cable3, which implements an entire IBM PC capable of running Windows 3.0 in only 4043…

0xcde4c3db used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-10-04 12:40:36 UTC to 2024-03-19 21:02:55 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2015	2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	1	2
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

9 sources

wzdd·Mar 19, 2024

Related, 8086tiny, a 2013 IOCCC winner. About twice as much source code, and if not cheating then certainly leaning heavily on the rules, but very impressive as it's a full x86 emulator with graphics and several peripherals. Original entry: https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2013_cable3 "Deobfuscated": https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny (Not mine, just a fan)

In Intel 8080 emulator. 19th IOCCC. Best of Show

lioeters·Apr 2, 2022

Sweet! That is a real work of art. I found a fully commented distribution of the original code: https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny/blob/master/8086tiny...

In Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser

jhallenworld·Apr 13, 2021

Nice- it would be awesome if it could emulate a 386 so that DOS extender-based programs could also work. It could support graphics (pop up a window if a program tries it). Another emulator does this- it's pretty easy with SDL: https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny You can run the CP/M Turbo PASCAL in almost the exact same way with this: https://github.com/jhallen/cpm

In EMU2: A simple text-mode x86 and DOS emulator

peter_d_sherman·Apr 13, 2020

Old text page about it: https://web.archive.org/web/20151109010757/http://www.megali... Probably more up-to-date github archive: https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny

In 8086tiny: A free PC XT-compatible virtual machine/emulator written in C

torgoguys·Oct 12, 2018

Here is the fully commented, non obfuscated version of this same emulator: https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny

In 4043 byte PC emulator (2013)

0xcde4c3db·Aug 12, 2017Recommendation phrase

> edit: By the way, if you download 2013.tar.bz2, I highly recommend checking out the cable3, which implements an entire IBM PC capable of running Windows 3.0 in only 4043 bytes (8086 nibbles). People interested in that emulator may also want to know that the non-obfuscated version (still only 760 physical lines of C, though that's partly achieved by putting opcode information in the BIOS ROM) has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny

In Time.gif

ingve·Jan 1, 2017Submission

8086tiny: a tiny PC emulator/virtual machine

32 points · Open discussion

xem·Jan 1, 2017

Indeed, the final goal is to make it compact too. Thanks for the link! Another source of inspiration for compactness is: https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny

In Mini x86 – An x86 documentation, decompiler and emulator in pure JS

userbinator·Oct 4, 2015

The architecture looks simple enough, but when I saw the source... https://github.com/gto76/comp-m2/tree/master/src ...that's quite a bit more code than I was expecting. https://github.com/gto76/comp-m2/blob/master/src/specific_in... https://github.com/gto76/comp-m2/blob/master/src/specific_in... IMHO this is a good example of how OOP can obfuscate. Over a dozen classes, all almost the same. This could easily be condensed into a single lookup table. For comparison, here is a complete 8086 emulator, and it also includes some code to emulate other hardware of the PC: https://github.com/adriancable/8086tiny/blob/master/8086tiny...

In Comp Mark II: Simple 4-bit/1 Hz Virtual Computer