Comment by rbanffy
6 hours ago
With all the capabilities, video and audio output, it might be an excellent platform for software emulation of older devices. There is plenty of GPIO that can be driven by the 40 MHz core while the other two work on nobler things.
It is a great platform for this, considering the cost. There have been several decent ESP based emulators already, including many consoles, a ZX Spectrum emulator, and even a 386 emulator.
https://github.com/foky26/Retro-Gamer
https://github.com/EremusOne/ESPectrum
https://github.com/hchunhui/tiny386
New chips like the one in the article should be even more capable. 486 won’t be out of reach for long.
One of the big problems has been handling peripheral emulation, multiple controllers, etc. USB plus the other cores should help with this.
I'm thinking of building something that emulates a VT-340 terminal. I can take MAME's emulation of the 80186, the ROM dumps, and have something that just translates the 80186 ROM code into a compilable program, with the hardware behavior informed by MAME's description (which is incomplete for the 3xx series).
That would be useful in the retro scene. I once was gifted a terminal from Tindie or Kickstarter or something that was built using custom PCBs and I think a PIC32. It was OK, but it only did VT100 and had some kinks that made it less useful than I hoped.