86Box

Name: 86Box
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

86Box is a hypervisor and IBM PC system emulator that specializes in running old operating systems and software designed for IBM PC systems and compatibles from 1981 thr...

Free • Open Source

Windows
Wine
Linux

★

Avg rating of 5 (1)| 1 comments

What is 86Box?

86Box is a hypervisor and IBM PC system emulator that specializes in running old operating systems and software designed for IBM PC systems and compatibles from 1981 through fairly recent system designs based on the PCI bus.

86Box is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2.

Features

Easy to use interface
Cycle-accurate low level emulation of 8086-based processors up to the Pentium
Great range of customizability of virtual machines
Many available systems, such as the very first IBM PC 5150 from 1981, or the more obscure IBM PS/2 line of systems based on the Micro Channel Architecture
Lots of supported peripherals including video adapters, sound cards, network adapters, hard disk controllers, and SCSI adapters
MIDI output to Windows built-in MIDI support, FluidSynth, or emulated Roland synthesizers
Supports running MS-DOS, older Windows versions, OS/2, many Linux distributions, or vintage systems such as BeOS or NEXTSTEP, and applications for these systems

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86Box Screenshots

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86Box Features

86Box information

Developed byThe 86Box Contributors
LicensingOpen Source (GPL-2.0) and Free product.
Written in
C
Alternatives7 alternatives listed

Supported Languages

English

GitHub repository

1,705 Stars
241 Forks
230 Open Issues
Updated

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86Box was added to AlternativeTo by LunaticAce on and this page was last updated .

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0x6A7232

★

Top positive comment• ago

Pulled from the Getting Started guide here, please see important addendum at the end containing quick links to essentials tools you will need.

Getting started

Please note that this page is a work in progress.

Here are the basic steps to help you get started with 86Box. The user interface has been designed to resemble Virtual PC, VirtualBox, etc., so if you used those programs before, this should all look familiar to you.

Step 1: Get the romset 86Box relies on a bunch of external binary files, called ROMs, to emulate various hardware. Together, these files are known as the romset. If you try to start 86Box without one, you’ll recieve an error and 86Box will close. You need to download the romset from here and extract the roms folder into the same folder where 86Box.exe is located.

Step 2: Meet the main window Once you got the romset in the right place, you can start 86Box.exe. The main window has three important areas:

The menu bar at the top, where most commands and options are located
The display area in the middle, which is where the output from the emulated machine will be rendered
The status bar at the bottom, containing icons for quickly accessing the configured peripheral devices

The Action menu has basic commands for controlling the emulated machine. You can cycle the power (also known as a hard reset), send the CTRL+ALT+DEL and CTRL+ALT+ESC keystrokes, pause the virtual machine or close it.

The View menu is mostly filled with various options for advanced users, so we’ll skip it for now. The Tools menu, on the other hand, is pretty important, as it allows you to access the settings for the virtual machine and take screenshots.

In the About menu, you can access the About 86Box window and see who helped make this emulator.

Step 3: Configure the hardware When you start a virtual machine, you probably want to configure it with the hardware options you want. This is much like putting together the hardware components to build a PC. To do this, go to the Tools menu and select Settings. This will bring up the settings window, which has a lot of options to chose from. So in order to not make this page too long, click here to see an overview of the settings window and more in-depth descriptions of individual options.

Step 4: Configure the BIOS Once you’ve selected the hardware components you wish to emulate, you need to make sure they’re properly configured. This is done through the system BIOS, same way it’s done on a real computer. The specifics of this of course differs from one machine to another, but generally you need to know how to enter the BIOS, which options to change, and which options to leave alone. See this page for more information.

Step 5: Mount some images Now that you’ve configured everything, you’re ready to run some software in your virtual machine. Maybe you want to install an operating system or play a booter game. In any case, you’ll have to mount some virtual media to get going. You can do this with the icons in the status bar. Icons representing removable media appear semi-transparent when their associated drive is empty, and fully opaque when media is inserted.

Depending on the hardware configuration you’ve chosen, you may or may not see the following icons in the status bar, from left to right:

Floppy disk: the icon is different for 3.5” and 5.25” floppy disk drives. This also determines the kind of floppy disk images you can use with a particular drive. You can have up to 4 floppy drives configured, though BIOS limitations also apply. To mount a floppy disk image, click on the floppy disk icon, select Existing image…, and select the disk image you wish to mount.
CD-ROM: this represents the CD-ROM drive you’ve configured, you can have up to 4 drives. To mount a disk image, click on the icon and select Image…, then select the image you wish to mount.
ZIP disk: represents the Iomega ZIP drive, also up to four drives. The mounting procedure is the same in this case as well, click on the icon, select Existing image… and select your ZIP disk image.
Hard disk drive: currently, this icon is there only to let you know that a hard disk drive has been configured. If you hover over it, the tooltip will tell you which interface was selected for this particular drive. Theoretically you could have an unlimited number of hard disk drives, but interface and BIOS limitations prevent this.
Network: there’s always only one network icon at most, it is only present if you’ve enabled a network interface. It doesn’t do anything yet other than let you know that networking capability has been enabled.
Sound: this icon is always present and allows you to set the sound gain level when double-clicked.

Icons will also flash a small green dot every now and then. This means the particular piece of hardware associated with the icon is in use; for example, the data on the hard disk drive is being read or written.

When you want to eject virtual media, click on the particular icon again and select Eject (for floppy and ZIP disks) or Empty (for CD-ROMs). The icon becomes semi-transparent again.

Step 6: Mouse and keyboard interaction Now you’re ready to do some stuff inside the emulated machine. Keyboard input is redirected there automatically whenever the emulator window has focus. All key presses and combinations will be redirected to the emulated machine.

Mouse input has to be manually “captured” and “released”. To capture the mouse in the emulated mahine, simply click inside the renderer area. Your host mouse cursor will disappear and your mouse movement and clicks will be redirected into the emulated machine. Now you can use the mouse inside the emulated machine (if the software and hardware configuration supports it of course).

To release the mouse, press F8 and F12 simultaneously. You can also use the middle mouse button for this if the emulated mouse only has two buttons.

Step 7: What now? If you made it this far, you got the basics of using 86Box, but there’s more features and options to explore. For example, you can try out 86Box Manager for easier management of multiple virtual machines. You can see what’s under the View or look at some of the more obscure options in the settings.

Keep in mind that because 86Box is constantly in development, various problems will come and go. If you think something’s not working the way it should, consider submitting an issue here on GitHub or joining official support channels on Discord or IRC.

Have fun!

86Box** is maintained by **OBattler.

This page was generated by GitHub Pages.

NB: You will need:

The latest ROM set mentioned on the 86Box Github main page here (which currently is roms-20201118.zip, please click on "Source Code (ZIP)" which is found by expanding the "Assets" heading at the bottom / end of the release description)
The latest Jenkins nightly build optimized for your particular CPU architecture from here. (You can download a non-optimized, debug, or dev version from the main page here but it is not recommended as your performance will be cut by as much as half - there is an explanation of what optimized build you need to download for your system on the optimized page mentioned above. If you're still not sure, download and run either the portable or setup version of CPU-Z to find what architecture your CPU is using.)
The latest 86Box Manager from here

[Edited by 0x6A7232, December 04]

[Edited by 0x6A7232, October 29]

[Edited by 0x6A7232, November 21]

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