QEMU

QEMU (manager) is the only solution against EGPFault in Win87EM.dll with newer Intel-CPUs

QEMU Manager is the very good Windows GUI for QEMU. In difference to VirtualBox or VMware Player you can emulate several CPUs, which is necessary for old 16bit applications with EGPFault in Win87EM.dll with newer Intel-CPUs (from 2013 and later) in all other virtual machines except QEMU.

So only with QEMU (not with VMware or VirtualBox or Windows XP Mode) you can use and compile Delphi 1.6 programs, when you have a newer Host-CPU from Intel. Without QEMU you must buy another computer with an AMD-CPU, because VirtualBox or VMware Player cannot emulate various CPUs, as QEMU can.

Details see:

• https://communities.vmware.com/message/2599248#2599248
• https://communities.vmware.com/people/jmattson/blog/2012/03
• https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=59741&start=30
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10511506/old-16-bit-application-causing-gpf-in-win87em-dll-intermittently
• https://www.administrator.de/frage/egpfault-win87em-dll-neuen-intel-cpus-allen-vmware-player-versionen-305694.html

Qemu is a solid solution for when Virtualbox has the blues. It also seems to run VMs slightly quicker, at least in my experience, which is always a solid plus.

Strengths:

• Drop-in replacement for VirtualBox. Assuming for the most frequently use features of VirtualBox.
• Easy to use Graphical User Interface (GUI). Multiple GUI to choose from at https://wiki.qemu.org/Links#GUIs_and_management_tools.2Fsystems
• Open source. If you are not familiar with "open source", it means this software is more secure. Because its code is publicly available for review and contributions at https://www.qemu.org/contribute
• Attractive GNU General Public License version 2. This means the software code of this extension is owned and supported by a friendly not-for-profit community. Instead of a for-profit corporation. https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/q/qemu/qemu_5.0-14~bpo10+1_copyright
• QEMU is a member of Software Freedom Conservancy. Which is a not-for-profit organization that provides legal and administrative assistance to open source projects. https://sfconservancy.org/projects/current/
• Large & friendly community of contributors
• Emulate Linux, macOS, Microsoft Windows, UNIX, and other platforms
• Fast. Often faster than VirtualBox.
• Full-system emulation
• Support a wide range of disk image formats. Such as, but not limited to, .dmg, .img, .iso, .vdi, .vmdk
• QEMU can save and restore the state of the virtual machine with all programs running.
• Guest operating systems do not need patching in order to run inside QEMU.
• Access a directory on the host filesystem from the guest using virtiofsd
• Available on Debian 10 Buster. With an optional Backport. So that you get the most recent version of QEMU at https://packages.debian.org/buster-backports/qemu
• QEMU can also do emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one architecture to run on another.

Challenges:

• Documentation is available on the web. But for newcomers it is limited, hard to find, and navigate. Any volunteer to contribute to improving QEMU documentation? Find https://wiki.qemu.org or https://www.qemu.org/contribute/
Alternatively, after installing QEMU, some documentation are available within QEMU

Using:

• QEMU: version 5
• Host: Debian 10 Buster

the best virtual machine I ever used for its performance and speed, unlike other VMs QEMU made it easier all you have to do is to bring the ISO and run it directly without any configuration, because yes it uses the real hardware you have, enjoy your distributions with your real speed.

there is no UI like virutalbox, everything is done in the command terminal.

It's simple and has made it easy to run different Linux distros virtually.