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.
