Yes we can …
When us mere mortals want to learn about a new computer language, or a new platform, we start out with the “Hello World”-variant and then try to dig in deeper…
Some people however when they want to study Javascript, raise the bar by writing optimized code for different Javascript Engines. Sharpening their skill set further by developing a JavaScript PC Emulator… That’s right, Fabrice Bellard of FFMpeg, tinycc, and Qemu fame has recently published a link to his JavaScript PC Emulator written in pure JavaScript and working in recent Firefox 4 and Google Chrome 11 browsers on different platforms.
Fabrice got his inspiration from the x86 dynamic translator code that is present in Qemu and he emulates a 32bit x86 cpu which is pretty close to a 486 without FPU.
More details on the actual emulator can be found on his web page.
Watch that space. For all you know, we’re going to be hooked on old school PC games in our browsers in the very near future…