First post, by jhhoward
Faux86 is an 8086 emulator that I have been developing to run bare metal on a Raspberry Pi. This means that the Pi does not have to boot Linux or any other OS first - it just boots straight into MS-DOS. This means a fast boot time and externally it looks like an actual x86 PC is booting.
Faux86 started as a fork of Mike Chamber's Fake86 emulator but a lot of the code has been shuffled around or rewritten.
Release binaries can be found here:
https://github.com/jhhoward/Faux86/releases
The emulator features:
- 8086 and 80186 instruction set emulation
- CGA / EGA / VGA emulation is mostly complete
- PC speaker, Adlib and Soundblaster sound emulation
- Serial mouse emulation
Currently Raspberry Pi models zero, 1, 2 and 3 are supported. To get up and running:
- Download the SD card image from the releases page
- Write the image to an SD card (e.g. using Win32DiskImager on Windows)
- Plug in your SD card to your Raspberry Pi and switch it on!
The release image has an included floppy disk boot image that the emulator will mount as drive A and boot from. The SD card will be mounted by the emulator as drive C. Just copy your favourite DOS games / apps to the SD card and you will be able to access them from the emulator.
The SD card image is fixed at 32MB as I had some problems with the emulator when trying to use larger disk sizes.