The emulation community has seen another major milestone after the recent Windows boot on a DEC Alpha ES40 emulator. Yufeng Gao, with assistance from gdwnlds KSC—the maintainer of the updated ES40‑fork—has released version 0.1 of his Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator. This release successfully boots the Itanium editions of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64‑bit, although OpenVMS, HP‑UX, Linux and BSD do not yet start.

Performance is modest, comparable to a 486‑class machine on a modern Ryzen 5000 series CPU, but the fact that it runs at all is exciting. Screenshots shared on Discord show the Luna theme running inside the emulator, confirming that the graphical subsystem works despite the slow speed.

As of now there are no known commercial Itanium emulators. The author hopes future work will enable OpenVMS and HP‑UX to run, referencing the architecture’s history via Wikipedia and a Retro Bytes video. He notes that Windows on Itanium saw little real‑world use, inviting readers to share any examples.

The emulator was announced on Twitter; the code is not yet open source but will be cleaned up and posted at https://github.com/The Broken Pipe/ski. An update dated 2026‑07‑20 mentions a QEMU fork capable of running Windows Server 2008, reportedly written with LLM assistance. Screenshots are available in the Discord channel.