YouTube retro gaming experiment channel Throaty Mumbo created a Windows-like desktop environment on the NES. The project took advantage of the EverDrive N8 Pro, an FPGA-powered NES cartridge that handles the heavy x86 emulation. Throaty Mumbo has made the NESPC project available on GitHub and included firmware for an RP2350 he used to make a USB interface for keyboard, mouse, and MIDI functionality.

Throaty Mumbo started out with ROMs he found on the internet, trying out a Chinese Windows 98 ROM that didn’t really do much. It had Paint, Windows Explorer, and plenty of things that looked like Windows 98 programs, but none of them were actually functional; only images of what the programs approximately look like. He also tried out a ROM of Linux, a project named NES86 by decrazyo, but it was incredibly slow and unusable, leading him to create his own ROM.

Since the NES’ 6502 8-bit microprocessor was too slow to emulate x86, Throaty Mumbo used the EverDrive N8 Pro, which has a much more powerful ARM-based Cyclone IV FPGA. It simply goes into the cartridge slot and takes advantage of the NES’ cartridge-side processing, basically making it act similarly to an external graphics card by outsourcing tasks to another processing unit. To run x86, Throaty Mumbo used Next186, an open-source FPGA soft processor core that can make the FPGA execute Intel 80186-compatible instructions as if it were an x86 CPU.

Throaty Mumbo first showed his NESPC project with a command-line interface, demonstrating how fast you can navigate the environment and run command-line programs like tty-tetris, which didn’t work well at such a low resolution, but he did show a command-line train animation running quite smoothly.

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