86Box

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Revision as of 18:28, 11 October 2016 by MoochMcGee (talk | contribs) (Floppy)
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Current version: v1
Active: Yes
OS: Windows, Linux
Authors: OBattler
Official website: 86Box
Source code: GitHub

86Box is an LLE PC emulator. It focuses on PC hardware from the 80's and 90's. A variety of operating systems can be installed in the emulator, which can then be used to launch programs. It is a fork of PCem.

Downloads

Overview

To run any program, an operating system needs to be installed in 86Box first. It has a dynamic recompiler that gives accurate Pentium support. It can also emulate numerous 2D and 3D cards, even the S3 ViRGE, which no other emulator supports.

Voodoo support used to be extremely slow, relying on frame skipping to stay full speed. However, in recent builds, this has changed with the introduction of a dynamic recompiler for the Voodoo. It is supposedly at least twice as fast as before, though some apps see up to a 4x increase in speed.

Image support

Floppy

  • IMG (Raw floppy images)
  • TD0
  • FDI (Both Japanese and stream)
  • 86F (Battler's own format, more accurate than IMG, and handles almost any exotic thing you can throw at it.)

Hard disk

  • IMG (Raw hard disk images)
  • fixed size VHDs (Unofficially, handled as an IMG. Usually works.)

CD-ROM

  • ISO
  • Mounting a real or virtual CD-ROM drive (this is the most accurate option.)

OS support

An incomplete list of operating systems that can be installed on it:

  • DOS
  • Windows 1/2
  • Windows 3/3.11
  • Windows 95
  • Windows 98
  • Windows ME
  • Select any IA-32 flavor of NT before Vista, it works.
  • OS/2 up to at least Warp 3
  • Any flavor of Linux that supports the original Pentium
  • BeOS

Hardware support

Video cards

  • MDA
  • Hercules
  • Hercules InColor
  • CGA
  • PCjr
  • Tandy
  • EGA
  • VGA
  • OAK OTI-067
  • OAK OTI-077
  • A couple of Trident cards
  • Cirrus GD5429
  • Tseng ET4000AX
  • Tseng ET4000/W32p
  • Various ATI cards before the Mach 64
  • ATI Mach 64
  • S3 Trio64
  • S3 ViRGE
  • 3dfx Voodoo (need another card that does VGA for this, just like the real deal)

There is also a preliminary branch out there for RIVA TNT support. When it works, it only works for VESA games, or Linux using VESA drivers, and even then it's only really been tested with Quake.

Sound cards

  • PCjr and Tandy
  • Game Blaster or Creative Music System
  • AdLib
  • Adlib Gold
  • Sound Blaster 1.0 through AWE32
  • Gravis Ultrasound
  • Windows Sound System
  • Innovation SSI-2001 (essentially a PC version of the SID)

The AWE32 has some features missing due to them not being fully understood.

Network cards

  • NE2000 ISA
  • Realtek RTL8029AS (basically a PCI version of the NE2000)

Keep in mind that PCAP requires manual configuration, but it supports more than just TCP and UDP traffic, unlike SLIRP.