Recommendation for a simple x86 emulator and operating system

Question

As a personal training project, I want to port my existing x86 emulator library to JavaScript, and then run a very simple operating system on top of it.

My only requirement for the library is that it must be written in C \ C ++, since I want to use emscripten and asm.js to compile the source files in JavaScript. The library should at least be able to interpret x86 opcodes; specific JavaScript environment details (memory, GUI, interrupts, etc.). I can realize myself. The operating system has no requirements if it is simple enough and can run on an emulator.

So far in my research, Softx86 seems to be the most viable solution, since it seems simple enough for a port to JavaScript (this is only a processor emulation). The simplest 16-bit real-mode operating system I can find is MikeOS , the only problem is that it requires a 386 processor that Softx86 cannot emulate, and I'm not sure if they are fully compatible.

My question is: if someone knows an alternative emulator-OS combination that is simple enough to port to JavaScript.

Answer 1

For those who will encounter this thread in the future, I decided to port Fake86 to JavaScript and use MS-DOS as the operating system.

You can see the live demo here.

It works very slowly, and currently only works in Firefox, but it works nonetheless.

You can see the full source code here.