86Box v4.0

[gattilorenz]

https://86box.net/2023/08/26/86box-v4-0.html

[dang]

Related. Others?

86Box 4.0 Released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37278672 - Aug 2023 (2 comments)

Try RetroBox (for 86Box) to play with old PC systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36386175 - June 2023 (1 comment)

86Box – Low level x86 emulator that runs older operating systems and software - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34144479 - Dec 2022 (33 comments)

86Box: Why Not Pentium III? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30940639 - April 2022 (98 comments)

The Starter's Guide to PCem and 86Box - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23649244 - June 2020 (1 comment)

[ggambetta]

Is any of these full PC emulators usable as a library? I've been looking at a few of them lately (DOSBox, Qemu, others) and I have the impression that their UI is tightly coupled with the emulation part :(

[muricula → ggambetta]

Unicorn is what you want. It was originally forked from QEMU: https://www.unicorn-engine.org/

[ggambetta → muricula]

This looks great on a first scan, thank you!

[aninteger → ggambetta]

I'd love to see this as well. I think for your purposes you could extend the emulator backed remakes article (which I still reference from time to time) you did a while back.

[ggambetta → aninteger]

That's exactly what I want to do :) But I want to build tooling around x86 + devices (VGA + sound card mostly) + basic OS, rather than building all that from scratch.

[LeoPanthera → ggambetta]

qemu surely is, it's the backend to a ton of virtualization products, Proxmox, UTM, etc.

[Matl → ggambetta]

What about libvirt?

[bombcar → Matl]

They may be looking for a real emulator not a virtualization- but to emulate you need to emulate the display …

[toast0 → bombcar]

I mean, you don't really need to emulate a display. Emulating serial can work enough, depending on exactly what you're looking for. I run my hobby OS mostly on serial (both on hardware and in emulators), because it's easier; but if you're trying to run existing PC software, it's certainly the case that much of it is built to run with display adapters.

[bombcar → toast0]

The "vast" majority of these emulators were originally written to run games, and it really shows.

My dad uses DOSBox to run an ancient text editor, and we had to figure out just how to disable some of the "game stuff" to make it work for him.

[o11c → bombcar]

It probably would be a good idea to refactor all those emulators to be supported by libvirt - it's not like the it requires the guest be the same arch.

[snvzz]

>Added serial port passthrough to real ports and named pipes

Finally.

Hopefully RFC2217[0] next? This is supported by pySerial, as well as some emulators (like winuae).

0. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2217.html

[jchw]

I found out I was the maintainer of the Nixpkgs derivation for 86Box when I got pinged to update it for 4.0 last week. Apparently, what happened was, I created and merged a derivation for it while working on something that it would've been useful for, but then got sidetracked and never actually wound up using it for that purpose.

Not that that's a bad thing, or anything. 86Box remains a useful tool as well as an entertaining toy and it's certainly nice to see more work being done on it. It did, however, remind me of how chronically bad I am at staying focused on one thing.

[itomato]

Neat!

> Fixed OpenStep text corruption and font sizing issues due to missing FXTRACT FPU instruction

[stavros]

What's the difference between this and something like VirtualBox? Legacy hardware emulation?

[gryson → stavros]

PCem and 86box are focused on accurate hardware emulation.

[stavros → gryson]

Ahh, thank you.

[CodeWriter23]

Does it run Captain Comic though?