A not-yet-working Windows emulator for the web (and maybe non-web?).
Doesn't really work for much yet, but I'm still tinkering!
Some sample programs:
- Zig "hello world".
- A basic DirectDraw demo, which came from this intro site
Click the "run" button in the corner to run these.
Software today is written in a world where the platform continually changes -- code you release today may stop working next year as the APIs and deprecations churn. You know what doesn't change? Dead platforms. Old video games written for a NES will work forever because the NES won't ever change again.
win32, the Windows 32-bit API, is such a platform. "win32 is the stable Linux userland ABI" is the observation that it might actually make sense for video game developers aiming for Linux to target the Windows API (which doesn't change) and rely on some translation layer to manage the Linux part (which always changes).
Today there are all these old .exe files lying around that are increasingly
hard to run. Even on Windows itself, there's a
32-bit Windows translation layer when
running on now standard x86-64 hardware. On non-Windows the best tool is Wine,
but it requires x86 hardware. On a recent non-x86 Mac
their x86 emulator dropped
32-bit support, so even Wine isn't sufficient there.
So my idea is this: what if you treated a win32 executable in the same way you treat a NES ROM -- as machine code for a CPU you no longer have, expecting hardware and an OS that doesn't exist? retrowin32 is an emulator that interprets the x86 instructions and implements the Windows OS API such that a win32 executable can run directly, without the Windows OS or an x86 beneath it.
See a comparison against other Windows emulator approaches (WINE, qemu, v86) for how this is similar but different.
win32/-- the x86/win32 emulatorwin32/src/winapi/-- the Windows API implementation
cli/-- a command-line emulator runnerwasm/-- a wrapper that exposes thewin32/APIweb/-- a webapp that uses the Wasm bundle to single-step/debug the emulator in a browser