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Emulated llama whipping, what an era we live in
86box is really fun, and the m4+ macs are great at running it. I've been working on a custom OS designed specifically for the pentium 2 core/isa (trying to write an high performance *nix for 1997-1999 for quake 1/2). 86box runs very faithfully to the real silicon p2s (and voodoo 3) I have without the nuisance of having to copy code over to it in development.
Ah, those specs will run Need for Speed II smoothly!
NSX !
Now I want to emulate my dual PIII-450 with an ATI Rage Fury 128 running Windows 2000.
Heh I had one of those back in the day with an Intel made L440GX+ and SCSI disks. One of my favourite machines.
Dual processor machines back then were rather exotic. I was coming from a period on BeOS (“one processor per person is not enough!”) and I’ve never really been able to endure non-SMP machines since 1995. It’s common now of course. I had 512 MB of RAM and a pair of 9.4 (?) SCSI disks connected in RAID-0: I liked to live dangerously back in the day. It ended in tears a few times but I also had a 2GB Iomega Jaz drive for backups… yeah… eventually I switched to DVD-R… yeah… there’s holes in my records.
Very cool! Never tried BeOS back in the day. I heard good things though.
Amazing times. I actually upgraded to that from a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 which had dual Pentium Pro 180s in it. Ran NT and occasionally FreeBSD. Cost me a small fortune at the time. Backups here were to a SCSI DLT (can't remember capacity) that was chucked in the trash at work. All it needed was a minor repair.
I miss Windows 2000. Win32 was such a good time in desktop computing.
Which motherboard did you have those in? I had a dual socket 370 EPoX board, but I never put a second CPU in it.
Also, sounds like I should work on upstreaming my Rage Fury 128 emulation...and the EPoX SMP emulation...(the perils of too much ADHD and too few tokens)
I would be interested to see a performance comparison with qemu and softgpu (https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu).
Or a Rosetta-based emulator (like Parallels). But 86Box is going to be very bad there.
While they claim "accuracy" as one of the goals for 86Box, I believe accuracy is overrated in PC emus (you don't really need that much accuracy due to the variety of PC clones, and emus are not that accurate anyway). For me the biggest point for using 86Box over other PC emulators/virtualizers is the large selection of virtual hardware available to emulate, not performance.
86Box is just accurate enough to run the original unmodified firmware. It does not emulate cache and RAM behavior, so you won't get performance-related accuracy. You are likely to succeed in Spectre-like attacks against an emulated 386, which shouldn't be possible on a real thing.
If you don't care and just want to go faster on a modern x86 CPU, you can replace the CPU emulation part of 86Box with a hypervisor. I tried running a Socket 7 motherboard firmware on Linux's KVM - given the chipset emulation is correct, it works: it amusingly identifies an AMD Zen5 running at 3GHz as "Unknown-S CPU at M60MHz" and boots to a DOS prompt.
But can it run Crysis? :-D
Hardly, given that the hardware predates the game.
I think most games are written to run on hardware that predates them.
Kind of, while chronological true, that misses the hardware configuration that the games expect to be available as means to execute their binary code.
It can run Doom for sure.
Emulated Voodoo 3? Does that mean I can run games using Glide?
Yes, you can.
I'd play Messiah[1] - such a hidden gem
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(video_game)
Available on Gog. Works fine on modern hardware last time I tried.
Wait, if single core performance matters, could it be that the MacBook Neo could be a good machine for 86Box? I assume thermal throttling could be a limitation but in theory it should be as fast as an M3 for single core performance.
Author of the article/site here, I have a MacBook neo I could test 86box on with this same build. But practically speaking yes, it has reasonable ST perf and my guess would be it's competitive with the best x86 chips available today for this workload.
Glide works, yeah, but check your 86Box dynarec setting first. I had Unreal crawling on an M2 until I realized I was still on the interpreter core.
I thought 86Box only emulated binaries, so I was a little confused on how it designates CPU speed and architecture. Good to know though...
That's Box86 [not a joke].
Thanks, you saved me a lot of time.
I love it! The great 2026 benchmark is a native Turok (I vividly remember that 30fps low poly iguana looking as real as Jurassic Park in my childhood), Unreal and Q3A.
I had that with GTA3: seemed photorealistic at the time.
A bunch of PS2 cards had this effect on me. Fifa 2001, Gran Turismo 3, etc.
Gran Turismo 3 still looks photo realistic!
I vaguely remember running a PlayStation emulator (bleem?) on my Pentium III 1Ghz processor.
Once the Mac mini M8 is released, will we be able to emulate a Pentium III which runs PlayStation emulation?
It ran VisualBoyAdvance pretty well! I haven't tried Project64 but I think the emulated Voodoo3 should support Jabos D3D6/7 backend with older versions. Was quite thrilled today to see my article blow up so if there's anything you'd want me to test I have mostly a free weekend.
But can it emulate having two voodoo II's and a desk fan pointed at it?
Computers got better, true
But those were much cooler than the ones today
Corrected title: My Childhood Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
I've been maintaining an emulated Pentium Pro 200 MHz Windows 95 machine on 86Box for some time with all my favorite old software from childhood. It's great for nostalgia, and if friends come over they have fun showing their kids things like SkiFree, Jezzball, and Encarta 96. Still holds up great for kids.
Quake party!!!!