Tiny386 On An Espressif ESP32-S3

November 13, 2025 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Some people may remember the joys of trying to boot Linux on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller, which was an absolute exercise in patience. In comparison [He Chunhui]’s Tiny386 emulator running on an ESP32-S3 MCU is positively zippy when it boots and runs Windows 95. The provided video (also embedded below) makes clear that while you can comfortably waddle off to prepare and pour a fresh cup of tea, it’s actually borderline usable.

The source code can be obtained via GitHub, which contains not just the basic emulated 80386 CPU written in C99, but also peripherals borrowed from TinyEMU and QEMU, along with a SeaBIOS ROM. In addition to the Windows 95 demo it’s claimed that Tiny386 should be able to run most 16/32-bit software.

Right now the ESP32-S3 version targets the JC3248W535 board, which is a roughly $30 development board featuring a built-in display with touch screen and an ESP32-S3 module. Although it has a USB-C port, it appears that this one is just for programming and not for the USB peripheral of the ESP32-S3. With the USB OTG peripheral used, one could conceivably make a small 386 system based around an ESP32-S3 that features a USB hub to plug a keyboard, mouse, etc. into.

Considering that the Tiny386 emulator is a very simple and straightforward approach to emulating an early-90s PC, some optimization might enable a pretty zippy general purpose PC for early 90s software. Quite a boost from watching Linux struggle into a command line on an AVR, indeed.

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OldVersion.com Archive Facing Shutdown Due To Financing Issues

November 7, 2025 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

Finding older versions of particular software can be a real chore, all too often only made possible by the sheer grace and benevolence of their creators. At the same time older versions of software can be the only way to dodge undesirable ‘upgrades’, track down regressions, do historical research, set up a retro computer system, and so on. This is where an archive like OldVersion.com (HTTP only so your browser may shout at you) is incredibly useful, offering thousands of installers for software covering a number of platforms.

Unfortunately, as noted on the website, they recently lost their main source of income in the form of Google advertising. This means that after launching in 2001, this archive may soon have to be shut down before long. Confusingly, trying to visit the blog throws a HTTP 503 error, and visiting the forum currently forces a redirect to a random news site unless you can mash that Esc button really fast, perhaps as alternative advertising partners are being trialed, or due to a hack.

Although these days we have sites like Archive.org to do more large scale archiving, OldVersion.com is special for being focused and well-organized, along with a long and rich history that would be a shame to lose. We have referenced the site in the past for old versions as far back as 2008. Hopefully we’ll soon find out more about what is going on with the archive and what its future will be.

Thanks to [Philip Perry] for the tip.

SolidWorks Certification… With FreeCAD?

November 5, 2025 by Tyler August 26 Comments

There are various CAD challenges out there that come with bragging rights. Some, like the Certified Solid Works Professional Exam (CWSP) might actually look good on a resume. [Deltahedra] is apparently not too interested in padding his resume, nor does he have much interest in SolidWorks, and so decided to conquer the CWSP with FreeCAD in the name of open source — and to show us all how he did it.

Because these CAD exams are meant to show your chops with the program, the resulting video makes an awesome FreeCAD tutorial. Spoiler alert: he’s able to model the part, though it takes him about 15 minutes. After modeling the part, the CWSP exam needs you to find the mass of the part, which [Deltahedra] does with the FCInfo macro — which, of course, he shows us how to install and use. The second and third questions are similar: change some variables (it is a parametric modeling software, after all) and find the new mass. In a second exercise, he needs to modify the model according to a new drawing. Modifying existing models can sometimes be more difficult than creating them, but [Deltahedra] and FreeCAD pass with flying colors once again.

If you’re at all curious about what FreeCAD can do, this video is a really impressive demonstration of FreeCAD’s part modeling workbench. We’ve had a few FreeCAD guides of our on on Hackaday, like this one on reverse engineering STLs and this one on best practices in the software, but if you’d asked us before the release of v1.0 we’d never have guessed you could use it for a SolidWorks exam in 2025. So while there are kudos due to [Deltahedra], the real accolades belong to the hardworking team behind FreeCAD that has brought it this far. Bravo!

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The most exciting search engine 68k can handle.

There’s Nothing Boring About Web Search On Retro Amigas

October 31, 2025 by Tyler August 23 Comments

Do you have a classic Amiga computer? Do you want to search the web with iBrowse, but keep running into all that pesky modern HTML5 and HTTPS? In that case, [Nihirash] created BoingSearch.com just for you!

BoingSearch was explicitly inspired by [ActionRetro]’s FrogFind search portal, and works similarly in practice. From an end-user perspective, they’re quite similar: both serve as search engines and strip down the websites listed by the search to pure HTML so old browsers can handle it.

Boing search in its natural habitat, iBrowse on Amiga.

The biggest difference we can see betwixt the two is that FrogFind will link to images while BoingSearch either loads them inline or strips them out entirely, depending on the browser you test with and how the page was formatted to begin with. (Ironically, modern Firefox doesn’t get images from BoingSearch’s page simplifier.) BoingSearch also gives you the option of searching with DuckDuckGo or Google via the SerpAPI, though note that poor [Nihirash] is paying out-of-pocket for google searches.

BoingSearch is explicitly aimed at the iBrowse browser for late-stage Amigas, but should work equally well with any modern browser. Apparently this project only exists because FrogFind went down for a week, and without the distraction of retrocomptuer websurfing, [Nihirash] was able to bash out his own version from scratch in Rust. If you want to self-host or see how they did it, [Nihirash] put the code on GitHub under a donationware license.

If you’re scratching your head why on earth people are still going on about Amiga in 2025, here’s one take on it.

Why You Shouldn’t Trade Walter Cronkite For An LLM

October 30, 2025 by Tyler August 45 Comments

Has anyone noticed that news stories have gotten shorter and pithier over the past few decades, sometimes seeming like summaries of what you used to peruse? In spite of that, huge numbers of people are relying on large language model (LLM) “AI” tools to get their news in the form of summaries. According to a study by the BBC and European Broadcasting Union, 47% of people find news summaries helpful. Over a third of Britons say they trust LLM summaries, and they probably ought not to, according to the beeb and co.

It’s a problem we’ve discussed before: as OpenAI researchers themselves admit, hallucinations are unavoidable. This more recent BBC-led study took a microscope to LLM summaries in particular, to find out how often and how badly they were tainted by hallucination.

Not all of those errors were considered a big deal, but in 20% of cases (on average) there were “major issues”–though that’s more-or-less independent of which model was being used. If there’s good news here, it’s that those numbers are better than they were when the beeb last performed this exercise earlier in the year. The whole report is worth reading if you’re a toaster-lover interested in the state of the art. (Especially if you want to see if this human-produced summary works better than an LLM-derived one.) If you’re a luddite, by contrast, you can rest easy that your instincts not to trust clanks remains reasonable… for now.

Either way, for the moment, it might be best to restrict the LLM to game dialog, and leave the news to totally-trustworthy humans who never err.

Hello World In C Without Linking In Libraries

October 29, 2025 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

If there’s one constant with software developers, it is that sometimes they get bored. At these times, they tend to think dangerous thoughts, usually starting with ‘What if…’. Next you know, they have gone down a dark and winding rabbit hole and found themselves staring at something so amazing that the only natural conclusion that comes to mind is that while educational, it serves no immediate purpose.

The idea of applying this to snipping out the <stdio.h> header in C and the printf() function that it provides definitely is a good example here. Starting from the typical Hello World example in C, [Old Man Yells at Code] over at YouTube first takes us from the standard dynamically linked binary at a bloated 16 kB, to the statically linked version at an eyepopping 767 kB.

To remove any such dynamic linkages, and to keep file sizes somewhat sane, he then proceeds to first use the write()function from the <unistd.h> header, which does indeed cut out the <stdio.h> include, before doing the reasonable thing and removing all includes by rewriting the code in x86 assembly.

While this gets the final binary size down to 9 kB and needs no libraries to link with, it still performs a syscall, after setting appropriate register values, to hand control back to the kernel for doing the actual printing. If you try doing something similar with syscall(), you have to link in libc, so it might very well be that this is the real way to do Hello World without includes or linking in libraries. Plus the asm keyword is part of C, although one could argue that at this point you could just as well write everything in x86 ASM.

Of course, one cannot argue that this experience isn’t incredibly educational, and decidedly answers the original ‘What if…’ question.

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