Posted by hugh4life 16 hours ago
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.
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 those were much cooler than the ones today
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)
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.