v86 emulates an x86-compatible CPU and hardware. Here's a list of emulated hardware:
An x86 compatible CPU. The instruction set is around Pentium 1 level. Some
features are missing, more specifically:
Task gates, far calls in protected mode
16 bit protected mode features
Single stepping
MMX, SSE
A bunch of FPU instructions
Some exceptions
A floating point unit (FPU). Calculations are done with JavaScript's double
precision numbers (64 bit), so they are not as precise as calculations on a
real FPU (80 bit).
A floppy disk controller (8272A).
An 8042 Keyboard Controller, PS2. With mouse support.
An 8254 Programmable Interval Timer (PIT).
An 8259 Programmable Interrupt Controller (PIC).
A CMOS Real Time Clock (RTC).
A generic VGA card with SVGA support and Bochs VBE Extensions.
A PCI bus. This one is partly incomplete and not used by every device.
An IDE disk controller.
An NE2000 (8390) PCI network card.
A virtio filesystem.
A SoundBlaster 16 sound card.
Testing
The disk images are not included in this repository. You can download them
directly from the website using:
A testsuite is available in tests/full/. Run it using node tests/full/run.js.
How to build, run and embed?
Building is only necessary for releases, open debug.html and everything should load out of the box
If you want a compressed and fast (i.e. with debug code removed) version, you
need Closure Compiler. Download it as shown below and run make build/v86_all.js.
ROM and disk images are loaded via XHR, so if you want to try out index.html
locally, make sure to serve it from a local webserver. You can use make run
to serve the files using Python's SimpleHTTPServer.
If you only want to embed v86 in a webpage you can use libv86.js. For
usage, check out the API and examples.
A couple of disk images are provided for testing. You can check them out
using wget -P images/ https://copy.sh/v86/images/{linux.iso,linux3.iso,kolibri.img,windows101.img,os8.dsk,freedos722.img,openbsd.img}.
Short summary:
# grab the main repo
git clone https://github.com/copy/v86.git &&cd v86
# grab the disk images
wget -P images/ https://copy.sh/v86/images/{linux.iso,linux3.iso,kolibri.img,windows101.img,os8.dsk,freedos722.img,openbsd.img}
# grab closure compiler
wget -P closure-compiler https://dl.google.com/closure-compiler/compiler-latest.zip
unzip -d closure-compiler closure-compiler/compiler-latest.zip *.jar
# build the library
make build/libv86.js
# run the tests
./tests/full/run.js
Compatibility
Here's an overview of the operating systems supported in v86:
Linux works pretty well.
Tinycore (3.16, 4.8 kernel): Works.
Nanolinux works.
Archlinux works with some caveats. See archlinux.md.
Damn Small Linux (2.4 Kernel): Doesn't work.
ReactOS works.
FreeDOS, Windows 1.01 and MS-DOS run very well.
KolibriOS works. A few applications need SSE.
Haiku boots, but takes very long (around 30 minutes).
No Android version seems to work, you still get a shell.
Windows 1, 3, 95 and 98 work. Windows XP is unstable, but can work with some
tweaks (see this issue). Other
versions might work but haven't been tested.