tiny386

It is a great platform for this, considering the cost. There have been several decent ESP based emulators already, including many consoles, a ZX Spectrum emulator, and even a 386 emulator. https://github.com/foky26/Retro-Gamer https://github.com/EremusOne/ESPectrum https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386 New chips like the one in the article should be even more capable. 486 won’t be out of reach for long. One of the big problems has been handling peripheral emulation, multiple controllers, etc. USB plus the other cores should help with this.

In case anyone missed it earlier on HN, there is a similar project that runs on an ESP32: https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386

Yep, there is a project tiny386, Win95 on ESP32, $1.85 chip. https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386/tree/master https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/11/14/windows-95-made-to-r...

He Chunhui’s Tiny386 emulates a 386 PC on an ESP32-S3 microcontroller. https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386

Super cool work! Here's the emulator source: https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386 I wonder what the "effective" clock of the emulated CPU is, maybe we could run Speedsys or Landmark under DOS on it to see how it fares against a real 386. I happen to have a top-end 386 at 40MHz, 16MB FPM, and S3 801 VGA, but it's not quite fast enough to "enjoy" Win95 for me. :)