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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 highly recommend you give Haiku a spin… the remake 25 years in the making and counting (which is several multiples the actual duration of the system it is “inspired by”, but that’s the nature of emulators and reproductions, isn’t it?). At any rate, it really gives the look and feel of the system as it was back then. The design is somehow peak late nineties distilled down into a powerful concentrate. (Make sure you click and hold shift to move the yellow tabs on the windows around.)
I miss Windows 2000. Win32 was such a good time in desktop computing.
Windows 2000 was some kind of brief apex. I was a beta tester and I saw it mature from ‘NT5’ into what it eventually became. It was too rapidly supplanted by Windows XP. It deserves to be remembered.
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 don’t really remember what motherboard I had. It definitely didn’t have dual sockets because the first PIII (Katmai) were Slot A devices. I even ran the utility to turn off the controversial unique serial number. I remember having all sorts of trouble after I replaced a processor because it turned out they had different steppings. I complained and made a pain of myself and eventually they replaced the existing unit with an equal stepping. Again, I can’t remember all the details.
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.
Kind of proving why accuracy is not really that important for the PC world. Most era firmware would have tried to run on as much variety of machines possible.
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.
A dual CPU board with a late 1GHZ Pentium III and a good video card might run it at lowest settings.
That isn't the hardware being discussed here.
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.
From my experience, the game crashed sometimes on Windows 7 (on old HP ProBook)
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!
This is especially true on a CRT. People often forget how "good enough" the PS2 graphics were, and how big of a deal that was.
Even the prior two games had an extremely tasteful use of textures and geometry that just felt right and realistic enough to not break immersion despite the hardware limitations. This era of gaming rightfully and correctly recognized that any form of "realism" is ultimately an impression rather than an objective truth.
Gran Turismo 3 was where I first started experiencing the "uncanny valley" of graphics. The game looked and felt incredible... so incredible that the lack of damage felt like an immersion-breaker in a way I hadn't experienced before.
I remember going to an electronics store with my friend. I couldn't figure out why they had a broadcast football game playing on a 15 inch LCD display up front. I assumed it was a game but then watched it for a few cuts and was so certain it was live footage...
It was a madden game on PS2 in demo mode.
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?
TIL you could SLI Vodoo 2's, and 3dfx invented it. Very cool. (It's different from the nvidia SLI, same acronym, different tech.)
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.
I think part of the reason it holds up still is things had to be designed for newcomers at the time, since people largely were.
Yep, I showed my little ones Odell Down Under in the browser at one point, they loved it. A certain amount of that old software I copied to .iso from my physical CD's, but not sure where I could grab something like Encarta 96. Legally.
Had also been thinking about asking Codex to boil the oceans in an attempt to fully decompile or reverse engineer that OG of 1990s 4X games, 'Stars!'*, which I have a copy of, so I could have something modern and native for MacOS that kept all the mechanics. Maybe I should just do this instead, will have to investigate.
IANAL and I have no idea where in the world you are, but downloading (as in with an http client) an ISO[1] is often treated rather dramatically very differently than distributing an ISO (as in a p2p torrent).
Alternatively: eBay. Encarta 96 CD-ROMs are available for about $20 in the US, delivered.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/ENCAR96ENCY
Many of those ISOs end up on archive.org if you dig around.
Memories of the ISO mounting program I had; so nice for all the disks to live on the server and just be mounted when needed.
This is the second time on HN this week I've seen someone reference Stars! It was such a fun game to play back in the 90s. I've had a similar desire to have Codex decompile a pet 90s game of mine for further modification. Not sure how far one could get before Codex complains about reverse engineering software.
EDIT: Here's the other Stars! thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49755378
Cinemania 97 was a big part of this era for me too, though it was far less widespread than Encarta. Fantastic resource for classic film, and into the 80s and 90s, though it was bit quirky watching it get further and further out of date, like the big 1999 films that defined my youth (The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, etc) all completely unknown to it of course.
Yes that was also packaged with my Gateway 2000
You had me at Winamp
Quake party!!!!
It gives me chills when I see the 3dMark 2000 benchmark visuals. I thought it is pure magic when I first saw it. What was a time to be alive!.
Yeah, I still remember the first time I ran glxgears on accelerated hardware and I could not believe my eyes
I had a fair amount of shares of TDFX back in the day, rode it all the way to their bankruptcy. NVDA bought the scraps and left retail shareholders like me with nothing. In a different reality, if 3dfx could have survived to the AI-era...
I wanted a 3DFX card so bad when I was 10yo.
And then I wanted a GeForce so bad. But I only got £10 a week from my paper round.
If I’d invested just one week of my paper round in Nvidia shares though, it would be worth over £10 million today.
More like 2 years of your £10 a week paper round for that £10m return.
And also never sold any of it between then and now.
When I was a kid I told my parents I wanted to invest some of my money in NVDA after we had a school assignment to study a company. They laughed and gave me a speech about stock picking. What they said was actually good advice, but looking back it would have been a home run.
At the time stock trades were still expensive. I remember one of the obstacles was thinking that of the small amount of birthday money I had saved up, $20 was going to go into the purchase and another $20 would have to come out of the sale. Then they explained taxes to me.
None of it would have mattered if I had been able to buy and hold, but at the time I remember being sad that even doubling my money would result in $40 of fees plus taxes, eating most of the gains.
I remember watching those promos of need for speed 2 SE running on a 3DFX and feeling like a peasant for not having one.
I still remember playing Quake 2 to death in software then finally getting a 3dfx card (I want to say it was a Banshee?), loading up the game and my mind being blown by how much more immersive it was.
Great times, the 3dfx name will always raise a smile for me.
Core memory unlocked. I remember being in my dark bedroom with he glow of the CRT playing Quake 2 grapple CTF for hours and hours. Eventually I got a Voodoo 3 in all it's 16-bit color glory.
It's wild how hazy those memories are becoming. Getting old is weird.
Played a huge amount of Quake Grapple on my Voodoo 2 12MB over a 28.8 modem back in high school.
That brings back some memories.
I played Unreal and UT a lot then. Our pc then had both a voodoo 2 and a riva tnt. I actually preferred the 32 bit color of the tnt... I think the salesperson should have known the voodoo 2 was not needed if there's already a riva tnt
Same. I spent an insane amount of my time practicing grappling in Quake2 Weapons Factory (and eventually WFA). I remember getting the Voodoo3 3000 seeing how amazing everything looked, and then immediately turning it all back off to get the highest FPS possible. Considering this was all over dial-up it's funny to think back on it now.
Rampage!
https://www.slideserve.com/hedy-gilmore/3dfx-rampage
Me too. I lost all my money at the time betting on TDFX. I was salty as fuck against Nvidia for decades until I had no choice but to buy their GPU 10-ish years ago. Now I’m a stockholder. I only wish I chose properly 25 years ago…
Really nice background in the recent book The Nvidia Way. The gist of it was Jensen recognized that having the best chip once wasn’t enough.
The result: Nvidia organized around delivering something new every six months. This meant a new architecture followed by two improved derivatives over an approx 18 month period. That turned 3dfx’s development schedule into a trap.
Conclusion: disciplined execution above all else.
Its interesting how even I didn't realize how competitive he was...until after the market realized recently. Wish these books would come out a year earlier than they did. :/
I guess i'm not cut out for stock trading. I'm always arriving as the train is departing both in real life and on the market.
As it turns out, neither is anyone else, even people who do it for a living. (If we constrain the definition of "stock trading" to mean researching and picking individual stocks.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
Oh my got, the floppy disk drive sound, is so accurate, I am in full nostalgia mode. Off on to ebay to buy a real PS2! haha. The pain, the pain of ISA Cards etc. ALthough no physical cuts!
PII at 600mhz would’ve been an impressive overclock back in the day
Why is this better than running Windows 98 on a guest VM (non-emulated) on modern x86 hardware?
Surely a modern hypervisor should be able to emulate a retro Voodoo 3D card.
Because that requires x86 hardware which some people no longer have.
Second sentence in the article:
This is what computers are for.
Is this written by an LLM? It reads like it.
I have not followed up x86 emulation recently, but is it a new project? or a port of bochs for Mac?
86Box has been around for 10 years and it'ss a fork of an even older emulator called PCem which started in 2007. 86Box is an amazing cross-platform project if you want to emulate an entire computer (up to Pentium III era) as acurately as possible.
Cool now do it reverse. How does an M6 perform on a pentium II?