Zabavno x86 emulator

Zabavno is an emulator for the x86 instruction set architecture. It emulates an Intel 80386 in real-address mode by translating machine code into Scheme and eval'ing it. The translations are cached, which makes it reasonably snippy.

Zabavno is licensed under the MIT license. See LICENSE.TXT for defails.

Why?

Originally the author needed an 80386 real-mode emulator in another project and decided to make a separate project for it. The name means funny or interesting.

Current status

The emulator can load simple DOS programs and start FreeDOS and MS-DOS from boot floppies. This is done by emulating just the CPU in combination with a pseudo BIOS written in Scheme. Programs run responsively but not blazingly fast, it's more like on a genuine 80386.

The major missing features are protected mode, 80387 emulation, and any sort of hardware interfaces at all (existing features are supported by BIOS calls).

Usage

First you need a Scheme. The recommended Scheme for running Zabavno is Chez Scheme, although any conforming R6RS Scheme implementation should work. See the build status badge above to find out which Schemes have been verified to work.

After having installed a Scheme compiler, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/weinholt/zabavno

Add the zabavno directory to your Scheme library path, i.e.:

export CHEZSCHEMELIBDIRS=/path/to/zabavno/..:$CHEZSCHEMELIBDIRS

Booting disk images

The program for machine emulation is programs/zabavno.

Boot floppies can be run like this:

programs/zabavno -fda fdboot.img 2>/dev/null

If you don't already have something to test with, you might like to try the FreeDOS 1.0 floppy.

There is support for 32MB hard drives. They can be given on the command line using the -hda flag. The last disk specified becomes the boot disk.

(There will be some printouts on stderr about missing BIOS calls and so on, so you might want to redirect them to /dev/null).

Running DOS programs

Some DOS programs can be run directly using the DOS emulation library.

Arguments to DOS programs are passed on the command line:

programs/zabavno-dos PKUNZJR.COM -o test.zip

The DOS emulation is quite incomplete. If it doesn't work then consider starting the program under FreeDOS, or implement the missing DOS calls.

Screenshots

Contact

The author can be contacted through the issue tracker on Github: https://github.com/weinholt/zabavno/issues

You can also email the author at goran@weinholt.se.