When was the golden age of PC gaming? Some might say it's now, some that it hasn't happened yet, but I know what I think - it started in around 1997 and it's still going strong. In 1997, the 3Dfx Voodoo graphics accelerator had gained widespread adoption, bringing fast 3D graphics to the masses, we had CPUs such as the Pentium MMX with 233 MHz, and some really good games were released. While we may not be able to relive our childhood, we can at least relive the games. Older games may not run on a modern operating system, however, but with an emulator such as 86Box, we can not only get old games to work, we can get pretty much the whole experience. Read on for how - and why! - you can set up your very own retro gaming machine.

First off, when I reading about 86Box, I really did not understand what it actually did. A PC emulator? Emulators that I have used in the past mostly were meant to just play games on some old console, such as Nestopia to emulate a Nintendo entertainment system. In that case, all you did was really to start the emulator and load a game. The fact that an actual machine was emulated in software was not really visible; all you would really see was the games. DosBox is another example; it can run a DOS environment, providing a DOS prompt from where DOS applications can be run - but the machine behind is pretty much invisible.

Windows Xp 86box

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86Box works in a similar fashion, but it's also very different. The simple reason is that a PC is very different - for example, you can't just load a game on a PC, you need to install the operating system first. Actually - you might even start by building the actual PC first. And it's this experience that 86Box offers: Build a machine to emulate, start it up, install the operating system, then install apps and games. In other words, there are no game ROMs to install here, it's just not how a PC works. We do however need to load some ROMs, and these represent actual hardware. Need a Pentium 200 MMX on an Asus Socket 7 motherboard? Download the ROM!

In this context, a ROM refers to a file that represents a piece of hardware, such as a graphics card. You can find a complete set of ROMs in this official non-official GitHub repo.In the folder you created in the previous step (where the 86Box executable file sits), create a subfolder called "roms", then download the whole ROM set and extract all the files (keeping directory structure) to the roms folder. Congratulations, you just downloaded a graphics card (and then some).

Open Tools, then Settings. Here you will find all the hardware to choose from and you are free to set up the machine as you like. I would recommend you step through the list on the left and set up motherboard, CPU, storage etc. Make sure to set up at least one CD/DVD drive since we will be using it to load media (local folders/CDs/ISOs) later. A floppy drive is also recommended.

This is the fun part and what really reminds me of what it was like building a PC in the late 90s. (Although it's not very different from how things are today!). Back then, installing Windows 98 was something I did pretty much on a monthly basis.

I will be using an ISO of an original windows 98 SE CD. Since we set up the machine to have an optical drive, we can load that ISO in the emulator and it's just like inserting a CD into a real machine. For me it seemed that booting from the CD did not work (may depend on the CD) so I loaded a Windows 98 boot disk image (yes, 3.5" floppy!) and started the installation from there.

Since it's an actual machine, we can (and should!) enter the BIOS setup, both because messing around there is fun, and also because we need to make sure we have the correct boot sequence. Typically A, then C, to boot from floppy and then attempt to boot from the hard drive.

I was pleased to see that not only did the spinning 3Dfx logo show up when I started a game with Glide support, but performance was surprisingly smooth. Your mileage may vary, of course - emulating a Pentium 200 MMX with a Voodoo 2 worked great on an AMD Ryzen 5 5600, but the experience was rather choppy on an old Intel Core i7 3770.

Why emulate a whole PC when there are other, easier options? Well - first, I think having several options is generally a good thing. You might be into DOS games, and in that case, maybe DosBox will get the job done just fine. Or maybe virtualization is a good option. Or, your game favorite retro game is available in a store (here is Ignition on Steam!). Either way, what struck me is that with "proper" emulation, you really do get the full package - from the PC speaker beeping during POST, to messing around with boot disks, to going through Windows screensavers just for kicks. If that's not your idea of a good time, I definitely understand! But I certainly do find the slight awkwardness of the old PC very entertaining.

Sadly PCem hasn't seen a release since 2021 when the (only?) author abandoned the project. 

86Box also has support for serial ports, which PCem doesn't have (this might or might not be a deal breaker depending on what you want to do with it). Lastly, 86Box also runs on Linux, while PCem is Windows only (officially).

Hi, I've just discovered these 2 emulators called PCem and 86box, which are similar to each other, but 86box comes with a little bit more features and even fixes the cursor issue I had on PCem (on PCem the cursor flies all over and just disappears, while on 86box I can use it just fine).

I set a virtual machine with a Pentium MMX 233, ISA Sound Blaster AWE32, 128MB of RAM (I typed in 256 and 512, but as the virtual machine starts, it always goes back to 128MB for some reason), an .iso image as a CD-ROM and floppy emulation.

I installed MS-DOS 6.22 and on top of it I installed Windows 95, it installed just fine, along with some drivers and a few games, BUT the virtual machine lags a lot !!! I don't have anything opened up besides the emulator and it lags, the sound stutters and makes horrible farting noises even during the bios screen, it's so annoying.

The difficult part of such heavier OSes is mostly emulating them at full speed. PCem and other emulators that use full CPU emulation(cycle-accurate or not) instead of dynamic recompilation won't easily run at 100% realtime speed. Since it's not running at 100% speed, sound produced is below 100% as well, causing sound to stutter(since the hardware doesn't produce sound as fast as the real audio card renders it, thus the stuttering). Especially at higher clock speeds(say 5MHz and up for cycle-accurate, maybe 10KIPS for a simple inaccurate non-cycle accurate CPU emulator).

Probaby some minimal setup with least accuracy, dynarec CPU emulation and as much hardware as possible disabled? It's as they say: accuracy takes power. So decrease most settings to their minimal values(CPU clock speed, IPS instead of cycle-accurate, minimum hardware emulation/accuracy). All little bits help.

You need a more powerful CPU and mobo.

The reason why on some boards you can't set more than 128MB of ram is because the 86box team prefers to set it per how the emulated motherboard originally supported the highest amount of ram when it shipped.

This is an attempt to provide a complete answer by summarizing bits from individual already existing answers, with some added content. The list tries to include all possibilities for a general case, even if some can be ruled out for this particular case.

As described by Joel Coehoorn, for a native x64 code a larger register set is available, as well as some additional instructions (e.g. all x64 CPUs are guaranteed to implement SSE and SSE2 instructions). This means native x64 OS and drivers can be more efficient.

64b is able to use full 4 GB (and even more when available). Moreover, some OS internal limits (paged/non-paged pool, maximum cache size) are increased with 64b OS. As a result, both memory paging and file caching may be more efficient.

When you have two OSes, each of them may be in a bit different state. One of them may be more fragmented than the other one, one of them may have a bit cleaner registry or less installed services or background applications than the other one.

Another possibility is x64 drivers might be of a better quality than x86 not because of some fundamental architecture differences, but simply because their vendor took more effort to optimize and fine tune them.

If you have an application which processes huge amounts of data (e.g. working in Photoshop with huge pictures), running 64b version can make a huge difference provided you have 4 GB or more of RAM installed.

Understandable. The games performance is determined by CPU and GPU. In case of CPU limitation the limiting code is the game itself, which is the same x86 code with little interfacing to x64 OS. The CPU performance is therefore the same. The GPU is the same. The driver and OS overhead in a well programmed game is low, therefore any driver or OS differences are not likely to show here.

The move from 32 to 64 bits is not the only change in the x64 architecture. x64 also adds more cpu registers and new cpu instructions. An operating system that knows how to take advantage of these can get a modest performance bump out of the same hardware. Oh, and getting 1GB of RAM back that used to be addressed to your video card doesn't hurt either.

Warning: this is a bit more complex question than you may have realized, and certainly more than most of the answers have portrayed. To try to cover at least a bit more of the story, this post is pretty long...

First of all, the situation with video memory. The entirety of the video card's memory is not (at least normally) directly visible in the CPU's address space. You usually have a "window" of about 128-256 megabytes of video memory visible to the CPU. The GPU can map different parts of its memory to that window, so you can typically write to most GPU memory from the CPU, but you need to tell the GPU ahead of time what you're going to write to before you can do so. Just for example, when you're using DirectX and you want to write directly to graphics memory, you can do that -- but to do it, you start by calling LockRect to get the GPU to map the right memory into the window (and as soon as you're done, you call UnlockRect so it can map other memory as needed). At least in the typical case, you can adjust the video window size in the BIOS setup. e1438dca32