Faux86: A portable, open-source 8086 emulator for bare metal Raspberry Pi (2019)
In this technical retrospective (2021), @wicket shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Pandemic Bubble (2020–2022)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 137 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 32 comments
This is demonstrated in the second half of this video (around the 11:30 mark):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh4LhcbSmXQ&t=619s
This seems good enough for emulating early 8088 and maybe even 80286 PCs, so opens up a big catalog of early games.
Judging from the Github issues it seems like it's very slow, doesn't run on RPi 4 and hasn't really gotten any attention for 16 months.
It's an interesting idea though; running a bare metal x86 emulator on e.g. a Raspberry Pi 400.
I came across box86 yesterday during FOSDEM. It have not yet tried it, but is similar and actively maintained: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
Why is this interesting?
I ask with genuine curiosity. I don’t understand enough about computer architectures. Is it that you can run stuff compiled for 8086 on RPi?
This indeed enables us to run DOS on Raspberry Pi: https://xkcd.com/1508/