Instead of mounting the vhd (which takes a lot of clicks and time), you can simply put all those drivers folders inside a folder to mount the folder as a CD driver. By the way, this is the best solution for those who, for whatever reason, chose to make an HDD image other than .vhd format. Edit: by using this method, the only thing that one must be aware of is that the sb16 installation file MUST BE copied from the CD to a folder in the win98 hd (cuz it will decompress itself, and it wont work while it is on the "CD", because CD medium is read-only, and 86box treat the mounted CD as that.
I'm Playing Unreal Gold on my Nintendo Switch, it's like a dream come true experience, really good performance, the onlt caveat being no real time lights which disables the flashlight and flares, and volumetrics which is just for the visual flair, it doesn't interfere with the gameplay. From someone who finished Unreal in 1998 with a Pentium 233MMX without any 3d accelarator, having this game fully portable that is not the Steam Deck and other PC Handhelds is a dream for sure.
Great work showing this emulator! One other option for transferring files into the emulated machine, is to mount a directory as a CD-ROM. It works really well too.
Nice video covering this gem of a program, I use it for all kinds of old emulating stuff as well as benchmarking it vs. some other programs like DOSBox. I've found 86Box's results being quite close vs. real world benchmark results as well. Some notes from me: The CPU emulation speed is highly dependant on your host CPU's speed. With my Ryzen 5800x3D, which has 8 cores and 16 threads, I cannot reliably go over 200MHZ with a Pentium II without games and even the OS itself stuttering constantly. This can be alleviated a bit by being content in running a original Pentium and Windows 95, but I'd forget using this emulator past the 486 era without a beefy host CPU. I also don't think this emulator is multitreaded, so you'll get better performance the better your single core speed is. Another way to move files to the emulated OS is by mounting a host OS folder as a CD-ROM drive in the emulator's settings. Not as fast as copying them inside the host OS, but requires less hassle and is maybe a bit more "authentic". I also recommend constricting the emulated HDD speed to the 1995 - 1998 speed settings since this reduces throughput and thus increases performance of the emulator. The CD drive rarely needs to be higher than 8x either.
First PC tower i bought as a a student in engineering school : - asus k7m - athlon slot A 500mhz - geforce 1 sdr - iiyama 17" monitor pro 410 Good old times 🎉
nice detailed video, thanks Phil! I watched somewhere, to make one "empty" emulated system and use it as a template for individual games: you copy the VM, install and configure single game and put EXE in autostart, so as machine boots game starts its like a ROM for consoles, and windows installation adds about 500 mb itself to the game file, which is not a big issue and you have console like experience :) did not find detailed instructions for it, would love to do it though
Shame the PCem dev quit the project because online trolls. We wouldn’t have 86box without her hard work. I hope the devs continue to improve their awesome emulator. Thanks for the tutorial, Phil!
Thank you Sir. I installed it at work. Everything was fine. Installed awe64 gold and tried wave table GS midi files. Surprisingly it works. Not great but works. Very cool post. I always wanted to try a awe 64 gold. Got the software off of your site. Then I tried doom with AW32. it works. wow. I noticed that setting the ram at 128 really helped vs 256. Now it runs at 400 mhz. What is amazing is this is all emulated by software. By people that must have too much time on their hands. Very cool.
Awesome overview of 86Box! Exactly the machine I'd want to emulate, I own two Slot 1 systems but rarely have the room to set them up. Hoping the performance improves in the future! I love how true to the hardware this emulator is, this will be how most retro enthusiasts in future generations experience it.
Love this channel. All the other tech youtubers I watch have just uploaded videos about the RTX 4070 Super as the NDA has expired, and here we are on a Pentium II and Voodoo 3 😁
This looks like a great way to go as soon as the optimizations catch up! It reminds me of WInUAE, The Amiga emulator. It allows you to to do alot of the same type of picking and choosing for optimal support per game. I really hope these devs keep on it. It looks like the way to go.
Impressive the number of systems in the configuration. Good for testing of software and hardware combos and if you have limited space. I don't think I'll be getting rid of my original hardware and not as fun as dealing with real world hardware compatibility and repairs, but as a supplement and quick usage cases it's very good..
great video followed it and got it working perfectly thanks at 9.03 if you right click on the start button you can choose disk management 7th option under network connections without typing anything.
To everyone making dumb comments about performance, this is cycle exact EMULATION and not VIRTUALIZATION. And in PCEm/86Box, it's even worse than usual because they're doing it across a whole range of hardware, not just the cpu and a few chips. VirtuaBox/VMWare will do a lot better because they "offload" a ton of crap using custom drivers and don't even emulate the CPU. But it comes with it's own set of problems. QEMU will "offload" some with custom drivers, but... it's own set of problems. As before, use PCEm/86Box for the really old stuff that has a lot of problem on anything but old hardware, DosBox for most DOS stuff and find some 2nd/3rd gen Core i3 office pc in the dumpster for W98/WXP stuff. Hard part will be finding a (good) old graphics card that supports W98.
Nice, I tried a while ago on my Ryzen 5 2600 and wasn't too happy about the performance, will try again with my 5600G and 5800X to see how they stand. Thanks for all the resources!
Nite that PCem runs quite a bit faster but it is said it is less accurate. In the games I tested I didn't see a difference so I would use PCem because if the better speed.
If an i9 13900 struggles to emulate a 450 MHz Pentium II system I can't imagine how long it will be until we have computers that can emulate Pentium 4-era systems with no issues! 86Box sounds pretty amazing, though. I've only ever tried VirtualBox and I didn't like it at all. There was no emulation of specific hardware like with 86Box.
I wonder if it will actually be needed by the time we get to it. Backwards compatibility is rather strong from the year 2000 on. I am rather sure a 450 PII is going play anything that you can't just play natively on a modern PC.
@@AxiomofDiscord There are few games that can be very tricky to run on modern systems. One example is the original release of The Sims. If you want to play the disc version there’s no way. The only way to play the game is to have the complete edition and then there’s a patch for it. Also Tony Hawk 3 is difficult to get running. There’s a patch for it but it’s hard to find it online.
@@2Plus2isChicken2013 Seems pretty reaching when you say oh these games have trouble running unless you patch them. I Believe I have the Sims I will give that a try, maybe I can trip by Tony Hawk 3 and see how it goes.
@@AxiomofDiscord It's just more annoyance than it should be to have to find patches to run games. Tony Hawk 3 requires a 500 MHz Pentium III at minimum, so running it in 86Box is out of the question. I'd prefer not to have to go looking around sketchy websites to find patches to my games. Unfortunately if we're not able to emulate beyond a 450 MHz Pentium II there will always be a few games that require that in order to be played, mainly stuff that came out in the early 2000s. Not every PC game from that period is available digitally.
This is a very helpful intro to setting up 86Box, and even though I've done it a number of times, I learned at least one new thing (using the Disk Management utility to mount your device's disk image) which will be a huge help. Personally, I've never really been able to bump the speed on my VMs past about 200MHz on my system (using a Ryzen 7950X) without starting to suffer from pretty bad audio stuttering. It doesn't bug me too much in my case; I use it for retro development more than gaming.
Is this with less than 256mb of ram and softfloat fpu off? You should be able to use 266 easy enough and likely a little faster without audio stutters. I get some stutters here and there at startup but that is it and that does not always happen. I am only using a 7700x.
Last time I ran 86Box my way to transfer files was a CD burning software (K3b on Linux). Used to add/remove files in an ISO to be mounted as a CD rom by the emulated win98. Works with the emulated machine turned on, and quite easy to use, albeit a somewhat inelegant method 😁
I use K3b to write Linux ISO to a DVD. I tried to write to a USB stick once but during boot, the BIOS was not seeing the USB stick. I will have to try again someday.
I fight hard to build, keep, maintain, and use retro machines, like my 486DX2, a couple of Gateway P3s (Voodoo5 in one, Voodoo3 in the other, and an Athlon XP system.) However, it gets more difficult as time goes on. Parts fail. Capacitors die. CRTs are almost not worth hunting down, especially considering that they will die, and they are difficult to get rid of. Sometimes an ebay seller will lie and say that a retro part has been "tested" and "working," but the part is DOA (I had this happen with a Voodoo5 once, seller decided not to fight me on the return after listing no returns but item "tested and working," and I took pics and video of it not working and attached them to my return request.) It is inevitable that 86box and DOSbox will be the only ways to enjoy this hobby. I hope that 86box can someday use the DOSbox staging CRT shaders you showed us in another video (or maybe shaderglass someday supporting them.) Then it will be difficult NOT to use 86box, hehehe..
This emulator is so GREAT... been using it for quite some time, the only missing thing is Sound Blaster Live with EAX emulation, once it has that, it can very well replace a true retro computer for late-DOS & Win98 gaming. But people have to keep the expectations under control, this an emulator focused on accuracy, it's not the typical console emulator, and emulating a true PC computer with 200 Mhz or more require a beast of a CPU with an immense single core performance and there's no benefit on multicore CPUs. a PII 450Mhz is out of reach for any existing consumer CPU rght now.
My Ryzen 9 7945HX can emulate PII 450Mhz without any issues in DOS. I have only tested Screamer Rally in SVGA 65k colors. Many popular games like quake are not free unfortunately. Hwinfo reports performance closer to PIII 800. Screamer rally is a smooth experience with no sound glitches. I believe modern CPUs fare much better than those 10 years ago and we are able to emulate much more than Pentium 200.
As always, awesome video. I will have to benchmark this 86Box machine vs my DOSBox Windows 95 one, with the latter one being mainly for older Win9x and Win3x games that don't need 3D acceleration. I'm installing 86Box on my work PC right now and the i3-8100 is struggling a bit. Even the cursor is struggling while installing Win98SE. Btw, next to me I have a Pentium II 400 laptop with Ati Rage LT Pro AGP which I found in one of the offices and where I installed Win98SE already. Lets see which one will get better benchmark scores. xD PS: Well, game 1 benchmark in 3D Mark 99 got 37.7 fps vs 11.2 on the laptop but the games had graphical glitches. It might have problems with Trilinear Filtering as the Bilinear tests very fine but the Trilinear one also had lots of graphical glitches. Have to test later on at home, if it's a problem with the integrated graphics of the i3-8100. PPS: At home with a R7 5800X and RTX4070 the graphics glitches remain. For example the UI in Incoming is totally messed up. The different renderers under "View" don't help, with Direct3D 9 causing a black screen. On the bright sight, Tomb Raider 2 run in 1920x1080 but going full screen, Tomb Raider 2 (installed from my backup ISO without any patches) is stretched instead of properly scaled to 16:9. One odd thing, setting the Win98 desktop resolution to 1080, having activated integer scaling and no matter if HiDPI scaling is on or off, switching to full screen, it doesn't fill my 4K screen, even though 2x 1080p should be 4K. PPPS: Alternative to mounting the virtual hard drive under the host Windows to copy files is mounting the folder of the files you want to copy as a CD-Rom withing 86Box.
This is SO COOL! I mean, I'm all for retro hardware or retro rockets, but sometimes I just wanna play Sim Theme Park without booting up that rig. Good stuff Phil!
Great video! I use iso images to transfer data to virtual machine fast. Mounting vhd is useful if you want to get files from the machine. Well, it depends on you environment, I guess. For me it is literally three clicks to create an iso so I use this, and iso mounts without VM shutdown, so when fiddling with some game, to make it work, it may be a more convenient way, than to reboot each time to mount and unmount vhd.
Before I built my retro PCs I played around with different virtualisation tools and emulators. It was a great learning experience and meant the set up went a lot quicker when I built the real thing. But as you say, performance really isn’t that great yet (doesn’t help my only modern computer is a Mac) so for me, it has to be the real thing for now…
I made a Windows 98 machine following this, except I used Ensoniq AudioPCI for the sound card. I had problems with the audio lagging/stuttering with this setup. However, when I switched the CPU type to Intel Pentium Pro, and set the memory to 128 MB, the audio seems to work just fine... Using 86box, I was able to get the Ensoniq AudioPCI to work in DOS, which I couldn't get it to work in DOS in VMware! I rather like how different the games sound with it compared to the original Sound Blaster that DOSBOX emulates.
Amount of selected RAM affects the emulation speed - instead of 256MB select as low as 128MB or even 64MB which greatly improves emulation speed and eliminate voice issues. 64MB or 128MB is still enough for most of the games anyway. The same issue is with PCem.
Nice program, i find it nerdier to run this with my MacOS and ARM M1 CPU, cause its not even close the same architecture. I mainly have 95'ish era configs, some pure MS-DOS and also MS-DOS + Win95/98 stuff configured, 486dx2/66Mhz and some earlier Pentiums. Also Gravis ultrasound is nice to have for the demoscene stuff. Good times 🤓
If your CPU is on the weak side, forget about emulating Windows 9x on a PII, it's going to throttle pretty bad. The best you can get is a Pentium MMX. And even that is going to require something somewhat beefy. You can get some extra performance by running Windows 2000 instead but that might not be a very good system for games.
Cool fact: For the display you can change rendering to Vulkan in 86Box.
3 หลายเดือนก่อน
My personal tip: before installing any games, shut down the emulated PC and compress the whole thing into a backup file. That way you have a base state you can revert to anytime you want to start from a clean slate, without having to do the whole setup once again.
86box is pretty awesome to troubleshoot certain hardware setups very quickly. I use it to test compatibility before I go out an buy the real hardware. Of course it doesn't show every detail as you go, but it answers the majority of setup questions before you dive in. Thanks Phil for your coverage of this great tool!
Really nice guide! But you left out the details how to identify if your system is too slow - so i will clarify that ;-) Both 86Box and PCem shows the emulation speed in the window title or status bar. If the emulation system stays within 99-100% you are totally fine. If the speed drops a bit randomly to max. 80% for a short period of time and gets back to 100%, its fine either - even if you get sound or frame laggs. But if your system is constantly below 100%, please downgrade your emulated CPU frequency or choose a lower CPU generation. Also you may try a AMD K6-II or K6-III based machine, but note that such CPU class is much higher demanding than any intel pentium series CPU's, due to its RISC implementation.
I think an interesting idea for a video would be to do a comparison between 86Box, PCem and DOSBox Staging, see how the performance is between them and what kind of hardware you can emulate, and features etc.
I'm really enjoying 86Box. While I would play Unreal on my modern machine, as GOG has ported it. There are plenty of games that have not been re-released and really work best on older sytems.
Great video Phil. I seem to be stuck with what feels like a 30hz refresh rate on the monitor? I go in to the advanced display settings and have the option up to 60-120hz but they all feel the same.. Am i missing something?
I have a i3 10100f and it struggles to emulate accurately anything above Pentium 166mmx... even though it's like -5% performance from a stock i7 7700 the IPC is not good enough. Luckly I run win98se natively on the same i3 system :)))) just by using the PCI slots I managed to get everything recognised: gpu, sound, usb 2.0.
My 7900x overclocked, just about accurately does a 233mmx, the p2-300 nope. That's just how poor the emulation performance is. I have athlon system with AGP and ISA slot that works well
For everyone that are surprised about the emulation speed. Both PCem and 86Box are "true" emulators: they emulate the entire system HARDWARE, from CPU, to mainboard components & graphics card. Thanks to that, they're very precise. That's contrary to for example DOSBox, which runs more like a VM
Then Im ancient because I used a Comodore64 and AppleDOS in High School, then AmigaOS, DOS/Windows3.1, MacOS 6.x and SystemV when I started Uni.... lol
@@enosunim when I started high school all the computers teacher and the labs/library computers where 486DX 66's running windows 3.1 some had Sound Blaster pro 2.0 cards installed, had I known they where over summer break to be replaced with some kind of (I think Pentium II's) running windows 95 (and yeah it still sucked lol) I would've tried to get a few of the 486's
Another amazing video, as always, but did i missed the part where you need to change a certain value in the "regedit" so that "98cd in the hard drive thing" can really work? Not for me, but for those who can't find that info.. One more time, a huge huge thank you!! Please don't take offense in this comment, not that intended!
I was positively surprised that 86Box seems to be capable of emulating fast PII machines on Ryzen 9 7945HX. Authors should consider adding support for PIII 450. My old Intel Core i7-920XM could only emulate max 486DX4 100Mhz.
@@philscomputerlab In the walkthrough a Voodoo3 card was installed. The readme file for Amigamerlin2.9 states it's for Voodoo4/5 cards, thus I'm not sure if I should use since it wasn't installed during the walkthrough.
Just wondering how others feel about Emulation & how you compare playing Retro Games on a Modern Emulating Time Machine like this to a Period Correct Build emotionally? For me while I do have just as much fun playing many of my old games like C&C from Origin & other Retro Games from my GOG Collection on my Athlon 200GE PC I don't get the Fizzy/Tingly Excitement of my Core 2 XP PC so it just doesn't feel the same emotionally.
After spending couple do days figuring staff out, I can say that this video needs a caveat about voodoo3 drivers. One the games I use for testing is a WH Dark Omen, which is notoriously hard to launch on modern hardware and OS. Turns out it also kind of flaky on voodoo3. It works on driver v1.01.02, but fails to launch on 1.03.00 and ANY later drivers, including recommended here amigamerlin one. Another hard case is SW Rogue Squadron, which i managed to make work correctly only on 1.03.00, later and earlier drivers have multitude of visual issues. Probably Voodoo3 emulation should be only recommended for DX7 games, where newest community drivers work well. It seems like for DirectX5-6-6.1 using S3 Trio64 + Voodoo Graphics emulation set to Voodoo2 works best in term of compatibility where both games worked on 3.01.01 driver.
Man, it is a good video, but what a machine you choose to emulate on 86Box: Step 1 to emulate a Pentium II on 86Box: Break in into NASA and steal at least four supercomputers you can run in parallel! Seriously: A high end last gen Ryzen 7 would struggle with anything over a Pentium MMX 133, it is super unoptimised! (But still, so accurate and with so many options that it might be the only viable option alongside PCem, which is less feature rich, better performant, but still not great in speed, and has not seen development for years.)
Out of curiosity, can you review DosBox Enhanced Community Edition? I think it has 3Dfx acceleration! A comparison with 86Box & PCEM might also be a good idea, Resource usage (RAM, CPU, harddisk footprint) Stuttering, Glitches Sound emulation Ease of integrating into a launcher (You already showed eXoDos using launchBox & the manager) especially try to run them on oldest supported hardware (maybe from XP ERA Core 2 Duo built in graphics , 4GB RAM) but using newer Operating system that support .NET Framework 4.6? Imagine how many e-waste can be used as a DOS machines BTW I noticed Unreal Tournament Gold GOG on intel965 graphics, windows8.1 runs average 120+ fps using openGl backend while it slowsdown using directX Did you know Terminal Velocity had a sequel released in same year? its called Fury3 1995
DosBOX ECE is dead, and even when it was alive it was easily eclipsed by DOSBox Staging. PCEM is also way behind in development compared to 86Box. Therefore it's easy to recommend 86Box and DOSBox Staging over these.
Just set up my own 86box with this configuration, and no notice about how important the DirectX 7a runtime is. I tried it with 6.1 included in a lot of games, and almost all of them throw an error for not seeing the GPU
I always Fdisk before installing Win9x; then copying the install files to a directory I created on the C drive, then run setup from there; time consuming but always worked out better for me.
Great video, very clear and everything works. Except 3dmark 99; which has all the textures inverted for some reasons. Tried to change settings but keep rendering everything with flickering textures in black and white for some reasons. 3Dmark 2000 instead works just fine (score a meager 1819 if you are curious)
@@philscomputerlab Thanks, got the one you have on the video description; for some reasons the issue seems to be just 3dmark 99. Did you try to run it ? Was it working for you? In the video you run games and those seems to work fine. I suspect that older games may not run as 3dmark 99 does not run well; will try some older stuff and see
My silly brain was asking the question that "Haven't we got through this before?" After I realized it was for PCem... Oops, very sorry for having such thoughts 😅 I'm like so-so on Emulators, I mean - I would love to emulate even better CPUs than Pentium II/K6-2, like a Athlon XP and such, but at same time - Like you said, seems funny that PS3 Emulators are already a thing, and this runs games like for example Grand Theft Auto V (The 2013 release, ofc), Gran Turismo 6 or something more old, like let's say Call of Duty 3... Meanwhile Pentium II emulation on PCem/86Box struggles with Keeping the audio without much stuttering, when something is loading or some of the games' performance. Kinda weird if you ask me. It's fun to mess around with the specs and whatnot, but for some serious gaming it's still a LOOOOONG way to go.
Well I used the same thumbnail, so I knew it would trick a few people. The PCem video did well so I kept the same thumbnail style and most people watching are as a result of a search.
Great video, but I'm afraid something is wrong - the sound is still stagering and looks like the direct x 7 you used is different from the one i get on the link you provided
Really great video. I guess this is more of a comment about x86 box or PCem but as a casual retro gamer I find it really difficult and confusing to understand the difference between all the configurations, particularly which motherboard to choose as there are so many. It's quite laborious to Google each component. Would be really nice to have some more info or even a photo alongside each selection when you're browsing through.
Try PS2Rate utility to up the polling rate of the PS/2 mouse. I remember using it on real hardware and funnily enough it works on 86Box too. 200hz makes the mouse feel a fair bit smoother and nicer. Hopefully the devs will implement seamless mouse feature, or at least something that will make the mouse feel as smooth as on the host machine. I've been using DOSBox Staging for this very reason and it's a massive game changer (as well as their dos_rate parameter, try setting it to 1000). It works fine with a lot of games and it makes the mouse ultra smooth and responsive (for example, I always found Master of Orion 2's mouse to feel laggy and odd on older DOSBox, but on Staging it's silky smooth).
I just find out about 86Box what a great video, can you please do Windows ME with all drivers updated and Windows 2000 I would live to see how they work
Some important information: PCEm, despite having fewer resources and being abandoned, is considerably faster. To make sure your hardware is powerful enough to handle the emulation of your chosen configuration, there is a percentage meter in the top left corner of the 86box, it should always be at 99%, 100%, 101%. Anything below this means the host is unable to maintain speed. The configuration to be emulated is directly related to your computer's hardware specifications. In terms of perfect emulation (always 100%) I can say that: Ryzen 5600G, 5700G, is enough to perfectly emulate Pentium 100Mhz on 86box, Pentium 120mhz on PCEm. Core i3 7100, is enough to perfectly emulate 486 @ 66mhz on PCEm I believe that a Ryzen 5800x is enough for Pentium MMX @ 200Mhz. The amount of RAM memory does not affect performance, and the real problem is the emulation of the processor cache to be emulated (by turning off the cache you will have a smooth emulation, at the cost of the slower guest). It doesn't matter if you have 192 cores, the emulation will only use a single thread to emulate the processor, so what matters here is the host clock speed and raw power that a single core can offer. The other cores/threads will be used for, for example, the graphics card emulation system, sound card, OPL... Many people think their spec is enough for, say, Pentium 2 233mhz, because it sees the counter at 100% most of the time, but that could be wrong. The first litmus test is when starting Windows, if the startup sound is choppy, guest is too loud. The second test is to open Windows Explorer (or my computer), this part of the rendering is chaotic, and usually slows down the emulation speed. The third is to navigate through the folders, when changing the directory, you can see the counter drop, and sometimes the "start.wav" sound being played choppy. Despite this, a large number of games can still run fluently, because they make use of instructions that the emulator can deliver quickly.
Yes this is also my observation, PCem v17 runs a lot better than 86Box. Apparently 86Box is more accurate though, but it's not something I noticed with the games I tried out. Some games are more stressful than others as well.
Oh, nice... I have been meaning to set up some Win 98 machines but all this time I thought I might have had to burn CDs. But with this I may not even have to. I will check this out for sure. Thanks!
Man, I really love how you just dive right in on these instructional videos. No silly intro, no runtime padding, just right into the good stuff. 👍
Yes!
Yeah, thats the spirit of a real babo!;D
Its True, awsome instructional 🙂
Austrians are known for their no-nonsense approach.
@@philscomputerlab By the way, Where is HDD.vhd?
Instead of mounting the vhd (which takes a lot of clicks and time), you can simply put all those drivers folders inside a folder to mount the folder as a CD driver. By the way, this is the best solution for those who, for whatever reason, chose to make an HDD image other than .vhd format.
Edit: by using this method, the only thing that one must be aware of is that the sb16 installation file MUST BE copied from the CD to a folder in the win98 hd (cuz it will decompress itself, and it wont work while it is on the "CD", because CD medium is read-only, and 86box treat the mounted CD as that.
Using 86box to get MW2 Mercs Titanium working after years of failing was kind of a revelation. So glad you're covering it here.
why not a Pentium 3 with the 256k of cache version for the win✊
I'm Playing Unreal Gold on my Nintendo Switch, it's like a dream come true experience, really good performance, the onlt caveat being no real time lights which disables the flashlight and flares, and volumetrics which is just for the visual flair, it doesn't interfere with the gameplay. From someone who finished Unreal in 1998 with a Pentium 233MMX without any 3d accelarator, having this game fully portable that is not the Steam Deck and other PC Handhelds is a dream for sure.
Great work showing this emulator! One other option for transferring files into the emulated machine, is to mount a directory as a CD-ROM. It works really well too.
Nice video covering this gem of a program, I use it for all kinds of old emulating stuff as well as benchmarking it vs. some other programs like DOSBox. I've found 86Box's results being quite close vs. real world benchmark results as well.
Some notes from me:
The CPU emulation speed is highly dependant on your host CPU's speed. With my Ryzen 5800x3D, which has 8 cores and 16 threads, I cannot reliably go over 200MHZ with a Pentium II without games and even the OS itself stuttering constantly. This can be alleviated a bit by being content in running a original Pentium and Windows 95, but I'd forget using this emulator past the 486 era without a beefy host CPU. I also don't think this emulator is multitreaded, so you'll get better performance the better your single core speed is.
Another way to move files to the emulated OS is by mounting a host OS folder as a CD-ROM drive in the emulator's settings. Not as fast as copying them inside the host OS, but requires less hassle and is maybe a bit more "authentic".
I also recommend constricting the emulated HDD speed to the 1995 - 1998 speed settings since this reduces throughput and thus increases performance of the emulator. The CD drive rarely needs to be higher than 8x either.
First PC tower i bought as a a student in engineering school :
- asus k7m
- athlon slot A 500mhz
- geforce 1 sdr
- iiyama 17" monitor pro 410
Good old times 🎉
i remember these Thermaltake Gold heatsink were better at cuting fingers compared to cooling CPU !
nice detailed video, thanks Phil!
I watched somewhere, to make one "empty" emulated system and use it as a template for individual games: you copy the VM, install and configure single game and put EXE in autostart, so as machine boots game starts its like a ROM for consoles, and windows installation adds about 500 mb itself to the game file, which is not a big issue and you have console like experience :) did not find detailed instructions for it, would love to do it though
Shame the PCem dev quit the project because online trolls. We wouldn’t have 86box without her hard work. I hope the devs continue to improve their awesome emulator.
Thanks for the tutorial, Phil!
TWO THUMBS UP! This is better emulation than DosBox and as close as possible to DOS-era hardware without the money, time and space limitations.
Thank you Sir. I installed it at work. Everything was fine. Installed awe64 gold and tried wave table GS midi files. Surprisingly it works. Not great but works. Very cool post. I always wanted to try a awe 64 gold. Got the software off of your site. Then I tried doom with AW32. it works. wow. I noticed that setting the ram at 128 really helped vs 256. Now it runs at 400 mhz. What is amazing is this is all emulated by software. By people that must have too much time on their hands. Very cool.
Awesome overview of 86Box! Exactly the machine I'd want to emulate, I own two Slot 1 systems but rarely have the room to set them up. Hoping the performance improves in the future! I love how true to the hardware this emulator is, this will be how most retro enthusiasts in future generations experience it.
Love this channel. All the other tech youtubers I watch have just uploaded videos about the RTX 4070 Super as the NDA has expired, and here we are on a Pentium II and Voodoo 3 😁
😊😁
Thank you so much! I'm trying to play MTG Battlemage and didn't want to go through all the trouble of buying legacy hardware just for that
Since I still have some time off from college, guess it's time I actually setup my 86box, this guide is mega helpful
This looks like a great way to go as soon as the optimizations catch up! It reminds me of WInUAE, The Amiga emulator. It allows you to to do alot of the same type of picking and choosing for optimal support per game. I really hope these devs keep on it. It looks like the way to go.
Impressive the number of systems in the configuration. Good for testing of software and hardware combos and if you have limited space. I don't think I'll be getting rid of my original hardware and not as fun as dealing with real world hardware compatibility and repairs, but as a supplement and quick usage cases it's very good..
I need this for Streaming a Classic Windows Games, very helpful.
great video followed it and got it working perfectly thanks at 9.03 if you right click on the start button you can choose disk management 7th option under network connections without typing anything.
Thanks for the info!
To everyone making dumb comments about performance, this is cycle exact EMULATION and not VIRTUALIZATION. And in PCEm/86Box, it's even worse than usual because they're doing it across a whole range of hardware, not just the cpu and a few chips. VirtuaBox/VMWare will do a lot better because they "offload" a ton of crap using custom drivers and don't even emulate the CPU. But it comes with it's own set of problems. QEMU will "offload" some with custom drivers, but... it's own set of problems.
As before, use PCEm/86Box for the really old stuff that has a lot of problem on anything but old hardware, DosBox for most DOS stuff and find some 2nd/3rd gen Core i3 office pc in the dumpster for W98/WXP stuff. Hard part will be finding a (good) old graphics card that supports W98.
Nice, I tried a while ago on my Ryzen 5 2600 and wasn't too happy about the performance, will try again with my 5600G and 5800X to see how they stand.
Thanks for all the resources!
Nite that PCem runs quite a bit faster but it is said it is less accurate. In the games I tested I didn't see a difference so I would use PCem because if the better speed.
Thanks so much for this! Finally got a good copy of of Win98 running on my M1 Mac.
If an i9 13900 struggles to emulate a 450 MHz Pentium II system I can't imagine how long it will be until we have computers that can emulate Pentium 4-era systems with no issues! 86Box sounds pretty amazing, though. I've only ever tried VirtualBox and I didn't like it at all. There was no emulation of specific hardware like with 86Box.
Yes this is the reality unfortunately....
I wonder if it will actually be needed by the time we get to it. Backwards compatibility is rather strong from the year 2000 on. I am rather sure a 450 PII is going play anything that you can't just play natively on a modern PC.
@@AxiomofDiscord There are few games that can be very tricky to run on modern systems. One example is the original release of The Sims. If you want to play the disc version there’s no way. The only way to play the game is to have the complete edition and then there’s a patch for it. Also Tony Hawk 3 is difficult to get running. There’s a patch for it but it’s hard to find it online.
@@2Plus2isChicken2013 Seems pretty reaching when you say oh these games have trouble running unless you patch them. I Believe I have the Sims I will give that a try, maybe I can trip by Tony Hawk 3 and see how it goes.
@@AxiomofDiscord It's just more annoyance than it should be to have to find patches to run games. Tony Hawk 3 requires a 500 MHz Pentium III at minimum, so running it in 86Box is out of the question. I'd prefer not to have to go looking around sketchy websites to find patches to my games. Unfortunately if we're not able to emulate beyond a 450 MHz Pentium II there will always be a few games that require that in order to be played, mainly stuff that came out in the early 2000s. Not every PC game from that period is available digitally.
16:32 you can aslo try open gl 3.0 renderer on 86box enable use target framerate set it to 60 fps and for sound fixes slow the cpu speed to 100
Yeah, agree. Unreal and UT99 with extreme texture pack + modern hardware looks very nice and runs silky smooth.
Thank you so much
This is the first guide I've found that hasn't led me to a driver issue when trying to install Windows
This is a very helpful intro to setting up 86Box, and even though I've done it a number of times, I learned at least one new thing (using the Disk Management utility to mount your device's disk image) which will be a huge help.
Personally, I've never really been able to bump the speed on my VMs past about 200MHz on my system (using a Ryzen 7950X) without starting to suffer from pretty bad audio stuttering. It doesn't bug me too much in my case; I use it for retro development more than gaming.
Is this with less than 256mb of ram and softfloat fpu off? You should be able to use 266 easy enough and likely a little faster without audio stutters. I get some stutters here and there at startup but that is it and that does not always happen. I am only using a 7700x.
VooDoo is back baby! Thank you! I can't wait to fire up MechWarrior 2 Titanium Edition.
Thanks for putting this together! I hadn't heard of 86Box until your video. Seems a million times better than using Vmware!
Last time I ran 86Box my way to transfer files was a CD burning software (K3b on Linux).
Used to add/remove files in an ISO to be mounted as a CD rom by the emulated win98.
Works with the emulated machine turned on, and quite easy to use, albeit a somewhat inelegant method 😁
I use K3b to write Linux ISO to a DVD.
I tried to write to a USB stick once but during boot, the BIOS was not seeing the USB stick. I will have to try again someday.
Im not so much into emulators.I prefer the real hardware but your videos are always a delight
I fight hard to build, keep, maintain, and use retro machines, like my 486DX2, a couple of Gateway P3s (Voodoo5 in one, Voodoo3 in the other, and an Athlon XP system.) However, it gets more difficult as time goes on. Parts fail. Capacitors die. CRTs are almost not worth hunting down, especially considering that they will die, and they are difficult to get rid of. Sometimes an ebay seller will lie and say that a retro part has been "tested" and "working," but the part is DOA (I had this happen with a Voodoo5 once, seller decided not to fight me on the return after listing no returns but item "tested and working," and I took pics and video of it not working and attached them to my return request.) It is inevitable that 86box and DOSbox will be the only ways to enjoy this hobby. I hope that 86box can someday use the DOSbox staging CRT shaders you showed us in another video (or maybe shaderglass someday supporting them.) Then it will be difficult NOT to use 86box, hehehe..
This emulator is so GREAT... been using it for quite some time, the only missing thing is Sound Blaster Live with EAX emulation, once it has that, it can very well replace a true retro computer for late-DOS & Win98 gaming. But people have to keep the expectations under control, this an emulator focused on accuracy, it's not the typical console emulator, and emulating a true PC computer with 200 Mhz or more require a beast of a CPU with an immense single core performance and there's no benefit on multicore CPUs. a PII 450Mhz is out of reach for any existing consumer CPU rght now.
My Ryzen 9 7945HX can emulate PII 450Mhz without any issues in DOS. I have only tested Screamer Rally in SVGA 65k colors. Many popular games like quake are not free unfortunately. Hwinfo reports performance closer to PIII 800. Screamer rally is a smooth experience with no sound glitches. I believe modern CPUs fare much better than those 10 years ago and we are able to emulate much more than Pentium 200.
thanks a lot Phil. Always fun to fiddle with emulators.
As always, awesome video. I will have to benchmark this 86Box machine vs my DOSBox Windows 95 one, with the latter one being mainly for older Win9x and Win3x games that don't need 3D acceleration.
I'm installing 86Box on my work PC right now and the i3-8100 is struggling a bit. Even the cursor is struggling while installing Win98SE. Btw, next to me I have a Pentium II 400 laptop with Ati Rage LT Pro AGP which I found in one of the offices and where I installed Win98SE already. Lets see which one will get better benchmark scores. xD
PS: Well, game 1 benchmark in 3D Mark 99 got 37.7 fps vs 11.2 on the laptop but the games had graphical glitches. It might have problems with Trilinear Filtering as the Bilinear tests very fine but the Trilinear one also had lots of graphical glitches. Have to test later on at home, if it's a problem with the integrated graphics of the i3-8100.
PPS: At home with a R7 5800X and RTX4070 the graphics glitches remain. For example the UI in Incoming is totally messed up. The different renderers under "View" don't help, with Direct3D 9 causing a black screen.
On the bright sight, Tomb Raider 2 run in 1920x1080 but going full screen, Tomb Raider 2 (installed from my backup ISO without any patches) is stretched instead of properly scaled to 16:9.
One odd thing, setting the Win98 desktop resolution to 1080, having activated integer scaling and no matter if HiDPI scaling is on or off, switching to full screen, it doesn't fill my 4K screen, even though 2x 1080p should be 4K.
PPPS: Alternative to mounting the virtual hard drive under the host Windows to copy files is mounting the folder of the files you want to copy as a CD-Rom withing 86Box.
A quick way to the windows partition manager is: right click on start icon -> Disk management.
This is SO COOL! I mean, I'm all for retro hardware or retro rockets, but sometimes I just wanna play Sim Theme Park without booting up that rig. Good stuff Phil!
Oh yeah. My retro toybox is satisfying as heck, but just running stuff on my primary system has a convenience value that can't be understated.
G'day Phil,
You did it again, I love these full instruction videos as they are so helpful for understanding each step of the process.
Many thanks!
Great video! I use iso images to transfer data to virtual machine fast. Mounting vhd is useful if you want to get files from the machine. Well, it depends on you environment, I guess. For me it is literally three clicks to create an iso so I use this, and iso mounts without VM shutdown, so when fiddling with some game, to make it work, it may be a more convenient way, than to reboot each time to mount and unmount vhd.
Thanks for sharing!
Before I built my retro PCs I played around with different virtualisation tools and emulators. It was a great learning experience and meant the set up went a lot quicker when I built the real thing. But as you say, performance really isn’t that great yet (doesn’t help my only modern computer is a Mac) so for me, it has to be the real thing for now…
Was literally looking for this video a day or two ago. Perfect timing. Thank you. 😊
I’ve been waiting for this video for a very long time
Thank you Phil. Now I can play madden 2000. Thank you
thanks a lot for your description !!!
Hey, you did it! I'm glad you were finally able to tackle 86Box. It is a really interesting option out there for deeper-level DOS emulation.
I made a Windows 98 machine following this, except I used Ensoniq AudioPCI for the sound card. I had problems with the audio lagging/stuttering with this setup. However, when I switched the CPU type to Intel Pentium Pro, and set the memory to 128 MB, the audio seems to work just fine... Using 86box, I was able to get the Ensoniq AudioPCI to work in DOS, which I couldn't get it to work in DOS in VMware! I rather like how different the games sound with it compared to the original Sound Blaster that DOSBOX emulates.
Awsome Video, realy good instructional , im try this method later and sends feedback from Portugal.
Awww Yeah! Breakfast w/Phil's Computer Lab!
Amazing tutorial! Thanks for the flood of memories
Amount of selected RAM affects the emulation speed - instead of 256MB select as low as 128MB or even 64MB which greatly improves emulation speed and eliminate voice issues. 64MB or 128MB is still enough for most of the games anyway. The same issue is with PCem.
Nice program, i find it nerdier to run this with my MacOS and ARM M1 CPU, cause its not even close the same architecture. I mainly have 95'ish era configs, some pure MS-DOS and also MS-DOS + Win95/98 stuff configured, 486dx2/66Mhz and some earlier Pentiums. Also Gravis ultrasound is nice to have for the demoscene stuff. Good times 🤓
it's nice to see that 13th gen i9 can emulate Pentium II 450MHz well
Great video, i always used Unreal in the late 90s to test computer speed and graphics capability!
If your CPU is on the weak side, forget about emulating Windows 9x on a PII, it's going to throttle pretty bad. The best you can get is a Pentium MMX. And even that is going to require something somewhat beefy. You can get some extra performance by running Windows 2000 instead but that might not be a very good system for games.
Cool fact: For the display you can change rendering to Vulkan in 86Box.
My personal tip: before installing any games, shut down the emulated PC and compress the whole thing into a backup file. That way you have a base state you can revert to anytime you want to start from a clean slate, without having to do the whole setup once again.
86box is pretty awesome to troubleshoot certain hardware setups very quickly. I use it to test compatibility before I go out an buy the real hardware. Of course it doesn't show every detail as you go, but it answers the majority of setup questions before you dive in. Thanks Phil for your coverage of this great tool!
Windows 11 looks like windows vista back in the day
Yup, looks good but still a million bugs. Still have a W11 bug that don't let me start ELDEN RING and give me WSOD.
why wait, get Linux now@@gundstaff
Really nice guide! But you left out the details how to identify if your system is too slow - so i will clarify that ;-)
Both 86Box and PCem shows the emulation speed in the window title or status bar. If the emulation system stays within 99-100% you are totally fine.
If the speed drops a bit randomly to max. 80% for a short period of time and gets back to 100%, its fine either - even if you get sound or frame laggs.
But if your system is constantly below 100%, please downgrade your emulated CPU frequency or choose a lower CPU generation. Also you may try a AMD K6-II or K6-III based machine, but note that such CPU class is much higher demanding than any intel pentium series CPU's, due to its RISC implementation.
Thank you!
It is worth noting that Intel adopted the "RISC core under an interpreter layer" architecture with the Pentium 2.
Thanks very much for this.
This vid is absolutely awesome
I think an interesting idea for a video would be to do a comparison between 86Box, PCem and DOSBox Staging, see how the performance is between them and what kind of hardware you can emulate, and features etc.
Great video what specs do you have for your hardware in your setup?
Fantastic work, thanks a lot for this...
Man,Love this !
I'm really enjoying 86Box. While I would play Unreal on my modern machine, as GOG has ported it. There are plenty of games that have not been re-released and really work best on older sytems.
thanks for drivers man helped a lot
Great video Phil. I seem to be stuck with what feels like a 30hz refresh rate on the monitor? I go in to the advanced display settings and have the option up to 60-120hz but they all feel the same.. Am i missing something?
I have a i3 10100f and it struggles to emulate accurately anything above Pentium 166mmx... even though it's like -5% performance from a stock i7 7700 the IPC is not good enough. Luckly I run win98se natively on the same i3 system :)))) just by using the PCI slots I managed to get everything recognised: gpu, sound, usb 2.0.
How? I want to know how this is possible, please share your experience.
Awesome!
My 7900x overclocked, just about accurately does a 233mmx, the p2-300 nope. That's just how poor the emulation performance is. I have athlon system with AGP and ISA slot that works well
PS3 emulator enter the chat...@@jondonnelly3
For everyone that are surprised about the emulation speed. Both PCem and 86Box are "true" emulators: they emulate the entire system HARDWARE, from CPU, to mainboard components & graphics card. Thanks to that, they're very precise.
That's contrary to for example DOSBox, which runs more like a VM
wat? dosbox is emul too.
@@VShuricKpcem and 86box emulate raw software, you can even run Linux on emulated hardware, you can not do the same thing with dosbox.
Windows 98 the OS of my high school years... man I'm getting old
Then Im ancient because I used a Comodore64 and AppleDOS in High School, then AmigaOS, DOS/Windows3.1, MacOS 6.x and SystemV when I started Uni.... lol
Windows98 was only on teachers PC, others were 486 with Windows95, I helped my teacher to maintain them, it was fun = )
@@nikmilosevic1696 lol
@@enosunim when I started high school all the computers teacher and the labs/library computers where 486DX 66's running windows 3.1 some had Sound Blaster pro 2.0 cards installed, had I known they where over summer break to be replaced with some kind of (I think Pentium II's) running windows 95 (and yeah it still sucked lol) I would've tried to get a few of the 486's
Another amazing video, as always, but did i missed the part where you need to change a certain value in the "regedit" so that "98cd in the hard drive thing" can really work? Not for me, but for those who can't find that info.. One more time, a huge huge thank you!! Please don't take offense in this comment, not that intended!
I was positively surprised that 86Box seems to be capable of emulating fast PII machines on Ryzen 9 7945HX. Authors should consider adding support for PIII 450. My old Intel Core i7-920XM could only emulate max 486DX4 100Mhz.
Thanks for the walkthrough. Where or when did you use Amigamerlin 2.9 and overclock.exe?
In relation to the 3dfx Voodoo.
@@philscomputerlab In the walkthrough a Voodoo3 card was installed. The readme file for Amigamerlin2.9 states it's for Voodoo4/5 cards, thus I'm not sure if I should use since it wasn't installed during the walkthrough.
@@wattosdeal Yea that driver is based in V4/5 but made to work for V3. They are community based.
very nice，thank you for making the video.
Just wondering how others feel about Emulation & how you compare playing Retro Games on a Modern Emulating Time Machine like this to a Period Correct Build emotionally?
For me while I do have just as much fun playing many of my old games like C&C from Origin & other Retro Games from my GOG Collection on my Athlon 200GE PC I don't get the Fizzy/Tingly Excitement of my Core 2 XP PC so it just doesn't feel the same emotionally.
After spending couple do days figuring staff out, I can say that this video needs a caveat about voodoo3 drivers.
One the games I use for testing is a WH Dark Omen, which is notoriously hard to launch on modern hardware and OS. Turns out it also kind of flaky on voodoo3. It works on driver v1.01.02, but fails to launch on 1.03.00 and ANY later drivers, including recommended here amigamerlin one.
Another hard case is SW Rogue Squadron, which i managed to make work correctly only on 1.03.00, later and earlier drivers have multitude of visual issues.
Probably Voodoo3 emulation should be only recommended for DX7 games, where newest community drivers work well.
It seems like for DirectX5-6-6.1 using S3 Trio64 + Voodoo Graphics emulation set to Voodoo2 works best in term of compatibility where both games worked on 3.01.01 driver.
@@L1vv4n Great information, thank you 😊
thanks for the vid. how does this compare to PCEM in your opinion?
You can get big problems with some included MB if you do not auto detect HDD from the bios i always do it if possible.
Man, it is a good video, but what a machine you choose to emulate on 86Box:
Step 1 to emulate a Pentium II on 86Box: Break in into NASA and steal at least four supercomputers you can run in parallel!
Seriously: A high end last gen Ryzen 7 would struggle with anything over a Pentium MMX 133, it is super unoptimised! (But still, so accurate and with so many options that it might be the only viable option alongside PCem, which is less feature rich, better performant, but still not great in speed, and has not seen development for years.)
Out of curiosity, can you review DosBox Enhanced Community Edition? I think it has 3Dfx acceleration!
A comparison with 86Box & PCEM might also be a good idea,
Resource usage (RAM, CPU, harddisk footprint)
Stuttering, Glitches
Sound emulation
Ease of integrating into a launcher (You already showed eXoDos using launchBox & the manager)
especially try to run them on oldest supported hardware (maybe from XP ERA Core 2 Duo built in graphics , 4GB RAM) but using newer Operating system that support .NET Framework 4.6?
Imagine how many e-waste can be used as a DOS machines
BTW I noticed Unreal Tournament Gold GOG on intel965 graphics, windows8.1 runs average 120+ fps using openGl backend while it slowsdown using directX
Did you know Terminal Velocity had a sequel released in same year? its called Fury3 1995
DosBOX ECE is dead, and even when it was alive it was easily eclipsed by DOSBox Staging.
PCEM is also way behind in development compared to 86Box.
Therefore it's easy to recommend 86Box and DOSBox Staging over these.
Isn't 86box a fork of pcem? I mean like speed between them will be same...
@@LordTuskis Got it 👍🏻
I wonder why GOG doesn't include Staging with their releases tho~
Just set up my own 86box with this configuration, and no notice about how important the DirectX 7a runtime is. I tried it with 6.1 included in a lot of games, and almost all of them throw an error for not seeing the GPU
you are the best thaanks
I always Fdisk before installing Win9x; then copying the install files to a directory I created on the C drive, then run setup from there; time consuming but always worked out better for me.
its great this very first i tryed it runs great
Great video, very clear and everything works. Except 3dmark 99; which has all the textures inverted for some reasons. Tried to change settings but keep rendering everything with flickering textures in black and white for some reasons. 3Dmark 2000 instead works just fine (score a meager 1819 if you are curious)
Makes sure DirectX is installed?
@@philscomputerlab Thanks, got the one you have on the video description; for some reasons the issue seems to be just 3dmark 99. Did you try to run it ? Was it working for you? In the video you run games and those seems to work fine.
I suspect that older games may not run as 3dmark 99 does not run well; will try some older stuff and see
X86 box doesn't have an option for a SB Live. Oh well. I had one when I had a Pentium 2 333 mhz, but I didn't have a Voodoo 3.
My silly brain was asking the question that "Haven't we got through this before?" After I realized it was for PCem... Oops, very sorry for having such thoughts 😅
I'm like so-so on Emulators, I mean - I would love to emulate even better CPUs than Pentium II/K6-2, like a Athlon XP and such, but at same time - Like you said, seems funny that PS3 Emulators are already a thing, and this runs games like for example Grand Theft Auto V (The 2013 release, ofc), Gran Turismo 6 or something more old, like let's say Call of Duty 3... Meanwhile Pentium II emulation on PCem/86Box struggles with Keeping the audio without much stuttering, when something is loading or some of the games' performance. Kinda weird if you ask me.
It's fun to mess around with the specs and whatnot, but for some serious gaming it's still a LOOOOONG way to go.
Well I used the same thumbnail, so I knew it would trick a few people. The PCem video did well so I kept the same thumbnail style and most people watching are as a result of a search.
@@philscomputerlab If anything, that is clever, but also a good observation.
Great video, but I'm afraid something is wrong - the sound is still stagering and looks like the direct x 7 you used is different from the one i get on the link you provided
Really great video. I guess this is more of a comment about x86 box or PCem but as a casual retro gamer I find it really difficult and confusing to understand the difference between all the configurations, particularly which motherboard to choose as there are so many. It's quite laborious to Google each component. Would be really nice to have some more info or even a photo alongside each selection when you're browsing through.
I love this! Unfortunately I hate how much the fps drops on the emulator when playing games like need for speed II :(
Great video! Danke sehr!
I always copied the win98 folder to the harddisk before installing via comman line and installed win98 HDD to HDD. It was much faster that way.
15 min This game looks better than Big Rigs.
You're insane Phil :D Thanks a bunch! I love it!
Try PS2Rate utility to up the polling rate of the PS/2 mouse. I remember using it on real hardware and funnily enough it works on 86Box too. 200hz makes the mouse feel a fair bit smoother and nicer.
Hopefully the devs will implement seamless mouse feature, or at least something that will make the mouse feel as smooth as on the host machine. I've been using DOSBox Staging for this very reason and it's a massive game changer (as well as their dos_rate parameter, try setting it to 1000). It works fine with a lot of games and it makes the mouse ultra smooth and responsive (for example, I always found Master of Orion 2's mouse to feel laggy and odd on older DOSBox, but on Staging it's silky smooth).
@@animaegray Staging is awesome, a heap of developments that really make a difference.
I just find out about 86Box what a great video, can you please do Windows ME with all drivers updated and Windows 2000 I would live to see how they work
Some important information: PCEm, despite having fewer resources and being abandoned, is considerably faster.
To make sure your hardware is powerful enough to handle the emulation of your chosen configuration, there is a percentage meter in the top left corner of the 86box, it should always be at 99%, 100%, 101%. Anything below this means the host is unable to maintain speed.
The configuration to be emulated is directly related to your computer's hardware specifications. In terms of perfect emulation (always 100%) I can say that:
Ryzen 5600G, 5700G, is enough to perfectly emulate Pentium 100Mhz on 86box, Pentium 120mhz on PCEm.
Core i3 7100, is enough to perfectly emulate 486 @ 66mhz on PCEm
I believe that a Ryzen 5800x is enough for Pentium MMX @ 200Mhz.
The amount of RAM memory does not affect performance, and the real problem is the emulation of the processor cache to be emulated (by turning off the cache you will have a smooth emulation, at the cost of the slower guest).
It doesn't matter if you have 192 cores, the emulation will only use a single thread to emulate the processor, so what matters here is the host clock speed and raw power that a single core can offer. The other cores/threads will be used for, for example, the graphics card emulation system, sound card, OPL...
Many people think their spec is enough for, say, Pentium 2 233mhz, because it sees the counter at 100% most of the time, but that could be wrong. The first litmus test is when starting Windows, if the startup sound is choppy, guest is too loud. The second test is to open Windows Explorer (or my computer), this part of the rendering is chaotic, and usually slows down the emulation speed. The third is to navigate through the folders, when changing the directory, you can see the counter drop, and sometimes the "start.wav" sound being played choppy. Despite this, a large number of games can still run fluently, because they make use of instructions that the emulator can deliver quickly.
Yes this is also my observation, PCem v17 runs a lot better than 86Box. Apparently 86Box is more accurate though, but it's not something I noticed with the games I tried out. Some games are more stressful than others as well.
Has this eclipsed pcem for retro pc emulation?
Oh, nice... I have been meaning to set up some Win 98 machines but all this time I thought I might have had to burn CDs. But with this I may not even have to. I will check this out for sure. Thanks!
Thanks as always, Phil!
I'm curious, is there a benefit to this over PCem? I've been messing with that since your last video on it.
86Box has Matrox Cards since version 4.1