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

284 points · 121 comments · hugh4life

  1. TimTheTinker · · focus · HN ↗
    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.

    1. newtonianrules · · focus · HN ↗
      Because that requires x86 hardware which some people no longer have.
    2. boomlinde · · focus · HN ↗
      Second sentence in the article:

      > CPU timing, chipset behaviour, ISA and PCI buses, graphics chipsets, sound devices, and disk controllers all matter to getting period software to behave properly.

    3. trollbridge · · focus · HN ↗
      No modern hypervisors emulate a Voodoo 3D card. The upcoming 86Box release will probably have Riva 128 and ATI Rage 128 emulation as well.

      Using an accurate emulation of such a device means you can use the drivers that existed back then that games back then were QA'd on.

      Most modern hypervisors aren't built with Windows 98 in mind, either - it's not really what they're for, and a modern Mac can't run an x86 hypervisor anyway.

    4. compiler-guy · · focus · HN ↗
      It's a highly specialized use-case where every little detail of the timing and hardware is important. So that, for example, games run exactly right.

      For folks without this particular use case, other emulation solutions are probably better.

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