8086tiny is a free, open source PC XT-compatible emulator/virtual
machine written in C. It is, we believe, the smallest of its kind
(the fully-commented source is around 28K). Despite its size,
8086tiny provides a highly accurate 8086 CPU emulation, together
with support for PC peripherals including XT-style keyboard,
floppy/hard disk, clock, timers, audio, and Hercules/CGA graphics.
8086tiny is powerful enough to run software like AutoCAD, Windows
3.0, and legacy PC games: the 8086tiny distribution includes Alley
Cat, the author's favorite PC game of all time.
8086tiny is highly portable and runs on practically any little
endian machine, from simple 32-bit MCUs upwards. 8086tiny has
successfully been deployed on 32-bit/64-bit Intel machines (Windows,
Mac OS X and Linux), Nexus 4/ARM (Android), iPad 3 and iPhone 5S
(iOS), and Raspberry Pi (Linux).
The philosophy of 8086tiny is to keep the code base as small as
possible, and through the open source license and repository on
GitHub encourage individual developers to tune and extend it as
per their specific requirements, adding support, for example, for
more complex instruction sets (e.g. Pentium) or peripherals (e.g.
mouse). Any questions, comments or suggestions are very welcome in
our forum.
