chip8-book VS v86

Not to discourage you, but there's already a CHIP-8 book in progress: https://github.com/aquova/chip8-book

WASM support would be so cool. There are lots of guides online which could help you out. I saw a guide for the chip8 and it didn't even look too difficult, you can check it out here https://github.com/aquova/chip8-book

Recently I've decided to learn low level programming with Rust. I asked for some projects to practice and got recommened to make a Chip8 emulator. That sounded fun so I searched a bit and found this guide that walks you step by step.

I made some emulators in Rust as a learning project during the start of the pandemic, and ran into the exact same issue when I wanted to make a wasm version to run in a browser. Eventually, I was able to figure out how to do it, although I do use the 'wasm-pack' Cargo package to assist with it (I think you can get away without it if you're really motivated, you just need to set up the targets and other elements yourself). Basically you define some Rust API to expose whatever you need from your project, then that and the project get compiled into one .wasm binary and some (surprisingly readable) JavaScript "glue" gets generated which allows for easy inclusion into a web page. It works well for code in the std, but I've had issues with 3rd party packages.

It's focused on emulation development, but I wrote a document that describes the process I followed: https://github.com/aquova/chip8-book/blob/master/src/wasm.md

I followed [this](https://github.com/aquova/chip8-book) book which uses Rust.

> As a thought experiment, we're almost there! We could technically have `win95.img + bochs86vm.wasm + autorun.inf + msword.exe` wrapped in a "browser evaluator"

I looked into this and... holy crap! We are there. Not for modern programs quite yet, sure, but this is amazing. You can use Windows 2000 from your browser.

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows2000

I think you are looking for Shadow.

https://shadow.goose.icu

Or just the whole kitchen sink. Why not?

http://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows98

Also: https://github.com/copy/v86 - more productized browser x86 runtime, used by eg https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm

Wonder if you could put all those databases in a Linux image and boot it using v86 [0], eliminating the need for a server.

[0] https://github.com/copy/v86

Trying it out in https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=kolibrios , it's also clearly a love letter to Windows 95 in particular. That could be an unstated goal here, create a very particular PC experience under very particular constraints. I don't know anything about the creator but it's very possible that this kind of work was actually their career in the 90s.

It's incredible how much work was done. Maybe this should be an internet curiosity like how TempleOS has become, though Terry's personality was a unique factor.

hmm, why would people still use VMWare? Isn't vbox open source, or even things such as https://copy.sh/v86/ would do most virtualization trick now days?

Oh, there are more OSes one can use at the parent page:

https://copy.sh/v86/

My highlights:

- First version of Windows (1.01)

- SerenityOS <3

- and even ReactOS