Thread

Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini

284 points · 121 comments · hugh4life

ranger_danger · 1790326910 · focus · HN ↗
I would be interested to see a performance comparison with qemu and softgpu (<a href="https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu).
1. AshamedCaptain · 1790333259 · focus · HN ↗
  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.
  1. kmeaw · 1790335369 · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    AshamedCaptain · 1790341026 · focus · HN ↗
    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.

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