A bit of alternate history: What if IBM had gone with an ARM instead of x86 for the IBM AT but tried to keep 100% backwards compatibility?
This is an in-browser ARM PC emulator, running an ARM port of MS-DOS 4 with full accurate PC hardware (VGA graphics, Sound Blaster, IDE, etc) and a ton of software ported to a very DOS-like ABI running ARM instructions. Off-the shelf games and applications like Doom, Quake, the GEM desktop and more were ported and recompiled for ARM-DOS.
Clones of many DOS applications were created, like a full Turbo C style IDE (with TinyCC as a compiler) or a pretty extensive QuickBasic like IDE are there.
You can launch TERM (a ProComm like terminal emulator) and dial a BBS, that runs as an entire second ARM-DOS PC in your browser and upload/download things and play door games. There's a second early AOL-like dialup service that lets you access real Wikipedia and Hacker News over the authentic speed modem - and even view images full screen and watch the re-encoded GIFs slowly download.
There's also a full Rosetta-like JIT converter. You can take most stock X86 DOS applications and just run them.
This is part an exploration of 80's PC nostalgia, and part a tech demo of what an IBM ARM PC could have been. Then trying to see how over the top this idea could be taken within the confines of a browser.
A bit of alternate history: What if IBM had gone with an ARM instead of x86 for the IBM AT but tried to keep 100% backwards compatibility?
This is an in-browser ARM PC emulator, running an ARM port of MS-DOS 4 with full accurate PC hardware (VGA graphics, Sound Blaster, IDE, etc) and a ton of software ported to a very DOS-like ABI running ARM instructions. Off-the shelf games and applications like Doom, Quake, the GEM desktop and more were ported and recompiled for ARM-DOS.
Clones of many DOS applications were created, like a full Turbo C style IDE (with TinyCC as a compiler) or a pretty extensive QuickBasic like IDE are there.
You can launch TERM (a ProComm like terminal emulator) and dial a BBS, that runs as an entire second ARM-DOS PC in your browser and upload/download things and play door games. There's a second early AOL-like dialup service that lets you access real Wikipedia and Hacker News over the authentic speed modem - and even view images full screen and watch the re-encoded GIFs slowly download.
There's also a full Rosetta-like JIT converter. You can take most stock X86 DOS applications and just run them.
This is part an exploration of 80's PC nostalgia, and part a tech demo of what an IBM ARM PC could have been. Then trying to see how over the top this idea could be taken within the confines of a browser.
https://kevin.day/armdos/ to play with this https://kevin.day/armdos/docs/ for manuals and more info
Nice. Next step is obvious: ship the actual hardware :3
I would be happy to buy!