He Chunhui (hchunhui) has developed the Tiny386 x86 PC emulator in C (C99) and managed to run Windows 3.1/3.2 and Windows 95 on an ESP32-S3 devkit with a 3.5-inch display. We had already seen Linux 5.0 boot on an ESP32 board, and Olimex ESP32-S3-DevKit-LiPo run a more recent Linux 6.3 image, but I think it might be the first time somebody has loaded Windows on ESP32 hardware. Bear in mind that since the Tiny386 is an emulator running SeaBIOS, it can also boot the Linux kernel directly. He Chunhui explains that the i386 CPU emulator is built from scratch and still lacks some features, such as debugging, hardware tasking, and certain permission checks. It also includes some 486 and 586 instructions to be able to boot a modern Linux kernel and Windows. The code is rather small as the CPU emulator is only about 6,000 lines of code (LOC) long, […]
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Read more here: https://www.cnx-software.com/2025/11/14/windows-95-made-to-run-on-esp32-s3-hardware-with-tiny386-x86-pc-emulator/
