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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

Is any of these full PC emulators usable as a library? I've been looking at a few of them lately (DOSBox, Qemu, others) and I have the impression that their UI is tightly coupled with the emulation part :(

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Unicorn is what you want. It was originally forked from QEMU: https://www.unicorn-engine.org/

This looks great on a first scan, thank you!

I'd love to see this as well. I think for your purposes you could extend the emulator backed remakes article (which I still reference from time to time) you did a while back.

That's exactly what I want to do :) But I want to build tooling around x86 + devices (VGA + sound card mostly) + basic OS, rather than building all that from scratch.

qemu surely is, it's the backend to a ton of virtualization products, Proxmox, UTM, etc.

What about libvirt?

They may be looking for a real emulator not a virtualization- but to emulate you need to emulate the display …

I mean, you don't really need to emulate a display. Emulating serial can work enough, depending on exactly what you're looking for. I run my hobby OS mostly on serial (both on hardware and in emulators), because it's easier; but if you're trying to run existing PC software, it's certainly the case that much of it is built to run with display adapters.

The "vast" majority of these emulators were originally written to run games, and it really shows.

My dad uses DOSBox to run an ancient text editor, and we had to figure out just how to disable some of the "game stuff" to make it work for him.

It probably would be a good idea to refactor all those emulators to be supported by libvirt - it's not like the it requires the guest be the same arch.

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