86Box: Emulator of x86-Based Machines

https://github.com/86Box/86Box

by tosh • 2 years ago

97 38 2 years ago

github.com

chungy• 2 years ago

See also, the main site: https://86box.net/

pantalaimon• 2 years ago

Not to be confused with https://box86.org/

anthk• 2 years ago

On PC emulation/DOS related, you used to have a FreeDOS 1.2 tgz for DOSEMU and I can't find it nowhere.

memsom2• 2 years ago

This is a nice project. I use it to emulate BeOS on an Apple Silicon Macbook.

tromp• 2 years ago

How does this compare with blink [1] ?

[1] https://github.com/jart/blink

sandreas2• 2 years ago

86box seems to be the successor of PCem, a GUI Emulator that is capable of emulating full Hardware (incl. Settings and BIOS/firmware) via GUI selection. I use it for old games, because emulating of 3dfx and similar is also possible in an easy way.

Maybe this can be done with blink, but probably not by selecting a few dropdowns and clicking some buttons...

nubinetwork• 2 years ago

Pcem is still being actively developed, even though Sarah Walker said she wasn't working on it anymore.

snvzz2• 2 years ago

Successor or fork?

I am not sure about the details, but I seem to remember it was not a very amicable fork.

powerhugs2• 2 years ago

Not at all. Blink according to themselves is:

blink is a virtual machine that runs x86-64-linux programs on different operating systems and hardware architectures.

Where 86Box is, according to themselves:

86Box is a low level x86 emulator that runs older operating systems and software designed for IBM PC systems and compatibles from 1981 through fairly recent system designs based on the PCI bus.

snvzz2• 2 years ago

Blink seems to be closer to qemu-user or box86/box64[0].

0. https://box86.org/

forty2• 2 years ago

Is this needed because recent x86-64 processors / hardware are not able to run older 32bits binaries anymore?

xcv123• 2 years ago

It runs on other CPU architectures and it emulates older PCs which include other hardware besides the CPU.

forty2• 2 years ago

Ah yes, they have ARM binaries indeed in the download section. I got trapped by the "minimum requirements": Intel Core 2 or AMD Athlon 64 processor or newer, which made me think it only ran on x86

sedatk• 2 years ago

Did you mean 16-bit binaries?

userbinator2• 2 years ago

AFAIK that's a software limitation, not a hardware one (yet).

NikkiA• 2 years ago

Intel dropped the "x86s" project to focus on a more collaborative approach with amd and others, so it's probably been shifted a few years out anyway.

dfox• 2 years ago

Technically it is an hardware limitation, amd64 in long mode has only vestigal support for memory segmentation (enough to implement Win32/ELF i386 TLS ABI and that's it), so you cannot reasonably run either 16b protected mode or vm86 tasks in 64b OS on that platform.

memsom2• 2 years ago

Getting any legacy OS to run on modern hardware is very hard. For example, in my case, BeOS has no EFI boot capability, has a serious RAM restriction, doesn't really like anything past a P4, and has no drivers for anything but legacy hardware (like, no modern storage drivers - IDE only, no SATA unless there is legacy BIOS emulation.) A lot of this is able to be worked around with various hacks, but with 86Box, it will run the OS as is it was on the actual hardware, so it just makes it a no brainer. You can then also use it to emulate old PC hardware on other processor architectures - like ARM.

powerhugs2• 2 years ago

It allows you to emulate MS-DOS or other legacy 16/32-bit operating systems on any supported hardware, such as ARM.

rnd03• 2 years ago

Strictly speaking, no. It's primarily developed (as I understand it) for cases (gaming, mostly, but some hobby/dev use) where emulating hardware accurately (think timings) is desireable.

In a sense it's also a history preservation project, though I doubt they would characterize it as such themselves. They don't do the documentation that pcjs does; but I think it's similar in spirit, if not in implementation specifics.

rnd03• 2 years ago

I should clarify that when I say that, I don't mean documentation about the emulator (which is coming along nicely), but documentation about the computers being emulated. I was specifically thinking of things like this ( https://www.pcjs.org/machines/pcx86/compaq/portable/ ) when I was writing that comment.

trollbridge• 2 years ago

This is an excellent piece of software - use it almost every day. It’s the best way to run basically any operating system from the pre-USB era. It includes a very good emulation of the IBM PC _jr_, a whole host of other ISA, VESA Local Bus, MCA, and PCI based machines. It also has CPU modes good enough to run troublesome programs that don’t function in DOSBox or dosemu2.

sebazzz• 2 years ago

I do occasionally run into stability issues, especially with 3D games. The emulation is not 100% perfect.

rougka• 2 years ago

wow, the screenshots attached to each release on github are deeply nostalgic

https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

accrual3• 2 years ago

I am a big fan of 86box for my retro PC hobby. Some neat things I've used it for:

* Log virtual POST codes to a text file for a physical motherboard I'm troubleshooting to see where it's hanging up

* Install an old OS to a .img file which I can then extract and pull bit-perfect files from

* Create a virtual hard drive with matching CHS values to a real hard drive, install an OS, then write the image to a real disk and boot it on real hardware

* And of course, play around with old hardware, software, and games in fairly accurate simulated way :)

rasz2• 2 years ago

Log virtual POST codes to a text file for a physical motherboard I'm troubleshooting to see where it's hanging up

I went as far as simulating defects by modifying individual hardware blocks in 86Box source code, recompiling, and checking resulting POST code because that seemed faster than carefully tracing BIOS :)

"Modified 86Box to break RTC always returning 0 or 0xff. POST_7 freeze." https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1041079#p1041079

accrual3• 2 years ago

That's awesome, rasz! It's amazing how 86box allows us to peer into hardware we otherwise couldn't easily access. 8)

exikyut2• 2 years ago

Log virtual POST codes to a text file for a physical motherboard I'm troubleshooting to see where it's hanging up

That sounds awesome but my brain can't follow today.

What did the setup look like here?

My brain's looking at a test motherboard, then at 86Box (which would presumably run on your main system), and I can't figure out how to connect the dots.

accrual3• 2 years ago

Definitely! I've been meaning to write a post about it.

I had a 486 motherboard that would hang somewhere during POST. I have a POST card that displays the current code from the ISA bus, but even with my phone camera in slow-mo mode, I wasn't able to capture the full list of codes - the value on the bus changed faster than what the POST card could output.

I turned to 86Box and found a very similar 486 board with the same chipset. There's an option to install a virtual POST card and show the codes in the application's status bar, but this also went by too fast for me to see what was going on.

So I downloaded the source, found the file for the POST card, and edited it to write the codes to the console as well. Then I fired up the virtual board again and produced a complete log of the POST codes during a cold start.

Together with the complete list from 86Box plus the codes from the real board, I found it was completing many steps but hanging on "chipset initialization". I still have some work to fix it, but it at least gave me some insight I wouldn't have otherwise had. :)

ralphc• 2 years ago

How does it handle serial to TCP connection? I'm using DOSBox now, you can configure a serial port to turn into a TCP connection.

86Box: Emulator of x86-Based Machines

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