86Box - An Introduction to PC Emulation

[@86Box]

Many thanks for the coverage, Shelby!

[@KhalidYousif87]

Many thanks for the constant feature updates and bugfixes :)

[@elbiggus]

You guys rule! In theory you've saved me a lot of space by not having to have a bunch of old machines lying around, although in practice I can't seem to stop myself accumulating more.

[@Gummybeer]

Thank YOU for all the great work!

[@wlb277]

I know it's near impossible probably currently to have the emulator be multi-threaded & not rely on single core performance, but if it ever gets to the point of CPUs having way better single core perf or make it possible to have multi-threading support, would you guys consider trying to emulate CPUs, GPUs & other hardware that's difficult to emulate at acceptable speeds from 1998 to maybe around 2002-03? I think PC hardware from around that period still deserves to be preserved & it'd be a shame if no one tried to basically save the stuff from around then.

[@damouze]

Many thanks for creating this software! I use it quite often these days.

[@NickyByloo]

Love it. Now I can emulate my first PC from 1989, a 286, 1MB RAM, 10MB HDD and EGA graphics. It's like a time capsule for old PC memories.

[@EirikrTinkerTries]

It’s also cool for testing modern OSes for hardware of that era like the ELKS Linux subsystem for 8088-286

[@volvo09]

A 286 with a monochrome monitor was our first family PC. We had it for so long! Didn't get a more powerful computer until we had a P-133 Win95 machine built at a local computer shop!

[@neoasura]

Same, I can emulate my first computer a eMachines from 2000, same wallpaper and all. Talk about unlocking some memories.

[@syrus3k]

Never watched your stuff before but the fact you submitted a pr to get it doing what you wanted instantly gives you +100 credibility

[@mikeall7012]

As a teenager, when I was new to PC upgrades and building, the boot sequence had me pulling my hair out one particular evening. I was stumped so hard and started to question my sanity, as I wasted several CDs, reimaging the boot disc over and over again. Oooo sweet memories lol. Learning through lumps is most effective, by evidence of me remembering that evening some 25 years later.

[@eidrag]

that's when I swear by cd-rw for task like this

[@HamburgerAmy]

all this emulation stuff aside, i absolutely love that tiny Pentium PC with the tiny monitor and tiny keyboard

[@TwoThreeFour]

Thank you. This made me remember my younger self installing DOS 3 - 6, Novell DOS, Win 3.1, OS/2, Win NT 3.11 (also the huge joy of installing Windows 95 for the very first time after it was released). Building PC from 8086 up to Pentium for myself, friends, relatives. Facing issues with Sound Blaster IRQ, broken floppy drives and disks. I also recall the joy of having successfully installed a 21 MB hard drive and adding 4 MB of extended RAM and a 8087 Cyrix Math Coprocessor on my uncle's 8086 IBM clone PC. And now I can simulate my younger self once again. What a time to be alive! 🥰🥰🥰

[@johto]

Good reply. Wont repeat what you said, almost the same story and timeline here, oh the memories, endless OS installations and tweaking... I'm right now installing OS/2 Warp ....just for giggles. Host is running M1 ARM with MacOS ..how have things changed LOL!🤓

[@Kagamiinchan]

As a contributor to 86Box myself, I couldn't help but be delighted by this video! BTW: don't forget to try out the ESS AudioDrive emulation in 4.2!

[@sampletextlensflare]

Hey AkBKukU, I appreciate your contributions in archiving as well as your coverage of older tech and emulation. Thank you for all that you do!

[@trance_trousers]

What's 'AkBKukU'?! I've watched lots of videos on the channel and seen it mentioned a few times.

[@KajuTheRudeMonke]

@@trance_trousers That's Tech Tangents' old name

[@Pasi123]

@@trance_trousers Shelby's username. It also used to be the channel's name before rebranding to Tech Tangents few years ago

[@trance_trousers]

@@Pasi123 oh I see, thanks! Does it mean anything, or is it just a string of random letters?

[@Pasi123]

@@trance_trousers He explained that in a video 'Channel Update Announcements'

[@fwingebritson]

Glad to see the enthusiasm for both the emulation and the hardware. The real fun though, is sticking with "the hard way." Sure, the shortcuts are convenient, but anticipation is the biggest part of the experience. BTW, thanks for putting dates into the selections as it will be a lot easier for people to "size" their machines by dates rather than guess.

[@BlackravenX9]

This came out at the perfect time for me. I just downloaded 86box for the first time 2 hours ago.

[@icanrunat3200mhz]

86box can make near 1:1 analogs of several PCs I have, and as such run each other’s boot drives, including my ‘98 Falcon-NW Mach V w/ PII-450, V3000, & ASUS P2B board. Emulates everything but the Diamond MX300. Killer stuff.

[@TheMerauder75]

Glad to see you formally cover 86Box. I've been following it since it first forked off of PCem, since it happened when I was tinkering with PCem for the first time in college. Fantastic piece of software, tons of fun to build out different machine configs and experience them fairly accurately.

[@m_ylane]

Reliving the feeling of playing with paint in win95 is incredible. The job these teams are making to preserve digital history and being able to experience it today is nothing short from heroic and I am forever grateful for the portable time machine!

[@insu_na]

Really great to see that you didn't just complain when you had an issue, you not only fixed it but also upstreamed the fix, and we really need more of that nowadays. Awesome stuff!

[@GearSeekers]

I love 86Box! My only problem is I love tinkering with the old hardware too much :D

[@joshpayne4015]

86Box is a great tool -- if you're a PC user or, likely, using a PC keyboard... Folks on MacOS using a Mac keyboard are left in the lurch owing to the inability to throw critical keystrokes to the emulator. Break key anybody? CTRL+BREAK is something I'm still trying to figure out how to send! And breaking out a captured mouse pointer is also eluding me!

[@justmoritz]

I just command+tab to another open application. End key doesn't seem to work

[@juliusapweiler1465]

I don't know about the break key, but for the captured mouse, Fn+control+right cursor key works fine on my MacBook.

[@86Box]

If you're on a laptop keyboard, Ctrl+Fn+Right Arrow will work. This is because Fn+Right Arrow natively maps to the end key on macOS. Therefore Ctrl+Fn+Right Arrow will send Ctrl+End to release the mouse.

[@Kaeltis]

Would love to see some more examples of different 86Box hardware configurations to emulate systems of different eras, especially for gaming. I went through 86Box a while back to play some of the Win98 games of my childhood and had no idea which hardware parts to use or which ones I even needed. Having something like built-in selectable presets would be perfect, but even a video or a list of hardware combinations would be enough for beginners to get started.

[@samuraidriver4x4]

Yes that would be great. Computers, laptops and hardware from that era are getting harder to find these days.

[@zoomosis]

Presets are a great idea.

[@madmax2069]

My first computer was a C64, and eventually got an old wise 286, and eventually a Compaq 3/25zs that had a Cyrix 486 clip on upgrade that did around 40Mhz that ran windows 3.1 but my first Pentium based PC was a pentium 133 with a 430 VX chipset and 32MB of Ram, and an S3 Virge DX. Started with Windows 95, the HDD went poof and I was stuck with DOS for a while. Eventually getting someone to install windows 98 onto it. A few upgrades over the years and it ended up having a 200Mhz MMX, 64MB Ram, a Voodoo 3 2000.

[@mesterak]

There is C64 Forever which is cheap to get that will allow you to play your old C64 games. I too started with a C64 followed by an Amiga 500 before I took the leap to a Packard Bell 386 back in 1995 lol

[@JeSuisUnePatate]

Love that vid. It reminds me all the issues I've experienced in the 90s that made me smiles. I'll give it a try for sure. Thank you!

[@WalnutSpice]

Been using PCem for years and been wanting to try something different but haven't really ever.. seeked anything different. Good video mate, excited to give this one a try and see what more it can emulate

[@SilverLays]

I've been using 86Box for 3 or 4 years now, and it's become a must-have for me for the whole MS-DOS 6.22 era right up to Windows 98 OSR2.5. I don't have the space or the money to invest in high-end hardware because of the explosion in retro price. In short, I'll never do without it again, and I make my small contribution to the project whenever I can. In short, go for it!

[@RootiferasRetroGameplay]

I've been using PCem and 86Box for quite some time now. They've been very helpful for testing some old software and games.

[@StrangelyIronic]

This is the route I went for my summer project of writing a game engine from scratch on a 386SX based Win3.1 system without having to dig up the hardware I have and buying what else I would need. I already write software on a real Apple IIgs and Mac iici (both were loaded with the best expansion/accelerator/upgrades you could get at the end of their life since both were used as workstations at my uncles work...and they didn't cap how much he could spend on building/upgrading them), for a hobby that I don't want to sink a ton of money into that's good enough for me. I have a real 386DX and a few 486 boards, just never had the "I'm more of a buffed up 286 than 386" 386SX to write programs on. It's every bit the potato I figured it was, but it did make me want to try and put together a 386SX machine.

[@Collinormous]

Ive been playing with 86Box for a while now! I have my 286 desktop re-built in 86Box and I use it to test software before I take the time to write floppies to move to the actual machine.

[@unimportant5122]

This is mindblowing. A industrial PC, controlling a machine, died at work yesterday. Socket 370 machine with intel 815+ICH2 chipset. Can't boot the drive (win2000) in another machine because it BSOD's (inaccessible boot device). Then I remembered this video and after some fiddling got to PCBox 4.2.3 which has a biostar board with 815+ICH2 in the list. Image booted first time without a hitch, that's some precise emulation :0. Once in, we could delete the storage controllers from device manager and make it boot on another machine with a different chipset...

[@meatpockets]

This is great! One of my favorite games growing up was Grand Theft Auto which ran/looks best with a 3DFX card. The catch is that Glide runs in DOS mode so getting it to run without real hardware is tricky.

[@kirknelson156]

when i was running windows 98 it was on a PII 400, all my games ran great on that

[@oldschooldude8370]

I'm a fan of DoSBox but this is awesome. I'll be checking it out.

[@woodenotaku]

It's good to remember that as heavy and bloated as the emulators are they're still faking it all under the hood. A fantastic example of this was a long standing bug that took years to fix in the original PCem relating to scrolling in DOS games, and even then the final fix was only a workaround. Ever launched Commander Keen on a real DOS machine only to be met with awful stuttering? That's not a problem with Keen itself but rather a hardware bug in your GPU. Any GPU that doesn't fully implement VESA standards properly will have issues with scrolling in various games like Commander Keen and Supaplex, for example this bug doesn't affect any S3 cards but it is an issue with nearly every ATI card ever made. With the old versions of PCem this bug was happening on all emulated GPUs, even S3 cards. The fix they implemented fixed it for all GPUs, even ATI cards because they all share the same backend code. This is of course fine if your software is expecting fully standard compliant hardware but also means everything breaks the moment your hardware doesn't have the bugs it should. A lot of games implement workarounds where they detect "Oops, we KNOW this graphics card or audio card needs a special fix!" only to break completely in an emulator such as these.

[@MarkTheMorose]

A most helpful video, thanks. I'd looked at PCem a while back, but it expected Linux users to compile from source, which I failed at. I got 86Box working thanks to your video.

[@Elder-Sage]

You just activated a PTSD I had forgotten. The VA-502 was not one of FIC's finer products. It was just such a buggy board. Loved the VA-503+.however!

[@deschoee]

Awesome! Thanks for sharing. I need to give this a try!

[@ThePressurizer]

This is an amazing piece of technology! Hats off to the developers!

[@ShdwHg]

One thing PCem does that 86Box doesn't (yet, I really hope they can implement it sooner rather than later) - I can mount an actual optical drive (or an emulated one on the host OS) as the optical drive in the emulated computer. This is pointless for BIN/CUE, but very essential for games with copy protection that require CCD or MDS files instead to placate them. PCem, I can mount the CCD or MDS with Alcohol 120%, point PCem to that emulated drive, and most of the time, that'll do it; 86Box has no recourse. (Said recourse doesn't even need to be mounting the host's optical drives; reading CCD or MDS directly would be even better!) To use an example I'm sure we're all familiar with: _Unreal Tournament_ has such copy protection software on its play disc. I can run it on PCem this way, but the copy protection fails on 86Box and will only request me to insert the CD until I abort. I *could* find a crack I guess, but I shouldn't need one to use my legally-purchased and self-backed-up software...

[@damouze]

I love 86Box. It's emulation is superb to put it mildly. I use it quite often.

[@Kap0wn3D711]

My go to for retro Pc gaming, I hope ATI Rage and Nvidia NV1 support is added for the exclusive games that only supported those cards in the future.

[@SailorLoonie]

This is the best video on 86 emulation Ive seen! Ill be checking this out immediately, thank you so much!

[@unikron2003]

This sounds superior to DosBox in many ways. I may need to look into this. Thanks for this video. I was totally unaware of this.

[@Bhenderson0001]

Wow what a great video, I learnt a lot. Will be checking for other videos.

[@devttyUSB0]

Thunk! What an awesome project! Thanks for covering it!

[@deabreu.tattoo]

Honestly, this is what I thought dosbox was when I first heard about it. This is awesome!

[@joeynessily]

Very informative. Its great people are preserving computing history. It’s sad the likes of Microsoft and Intel don’t have any ‘historical’ departments and preservation teams. They could help build these emulators and support these open projects. Just imagine manufacturers like Porsche and Ferrari sent lawyers to historic race teams to shut them down… both those companies have dedicated experts who rebuild and maintain collections of their old vehicles and share them in their own museums.

[@elbiggus]

In Microsoft's defence they've done a better job than most companies when it comes to backwards compatibility and preservation (particularly in the console space).

[@christopherdecorte1599]

I contacted Microsoft to try obtain legal copies of os's dos versions and windows 9x they said it's okay to download them and use them since they no longer sell and support them so I suggested they sell a collection for those of us that want conveint sets that are authentic since ebay is ridiculously overpriced.

[@scotshabalam2432]

Windows 95 makes me feel all fuzzy warm inside. I was using PCs when Windows leapt from 3.1(which felt like a accident while trying to copy Apple) to 95 which felt like a highly functional-usable art project. Win7 was probably the best but 95 gave me the most feels.

[@ZenIsFluffy]

Been tinkering with it the past few months and it's so fun to learn more about this era of hardware in a convenient way. Would love to see more videos on the subject!

[@Grandmaster-G]

... i can play _Interstate76_ again !! Life is good..... thank you very much.

[@RandomDude989]

Been trying to get a Nic installed for the past hour. Use to do this all the time 20 years ago (on real hardware).... but for some reason this is kicking my butt.

[@dragom3417]

This video made my weekend. I've become bored with emulation, and being able to mess with the hardware I had as a kid was amazing fun!

[@jps99]

Thanks for the awesome intro to 86Box! My first computer was a MicroAce (ZX80 clone) followed by a Radio Shack Model 3, then an AppleII clone and my first IBM machine was an XT with a 10 Meg HD ($700 option at the time!) I've been looking for a way to run old Dos games on my Linux computer, trying Dosbox and ExoDos, but having nothing but problems. 86Dos is working great thanks to you. Earned my subscription for sure!

[@PolarisFx]

Excellent video, my wife isn't pleased that I pulled boxes out of storage but I installed my cd copy of Windows 98SE and now I'm installing every game from my collection. Recreated my PII-300 from 1997 almost exactly. Just about to play some Dungeon Keeper.

[@ScottyBrockway]

This is awesome, can't wait for more video and sound card emulation!

[@JohnSmith-xq1pz]

I love x86box, itmlet me recreate the pentium 233mmx we had back in the day Edit 1 month later... Sadly I've confirmed our Pentium 233MMX is gone. RIP! So looks like I'll have to use 86box to recreate it. Thankfully I still have an old burned backup disc with the final release of the drivers for the 3d blaster voodoo banshie and sound blaster live vaule cards aswhile as the super socket 7 motherboards driver disc. In the meantime I raise my glass to you lost computer of my youth 🍺

[@properjob2311]

ah win98 the good old days - we used to play Revolt at work on our Novell network!

[@ratcomuk]

thanks for the info, bookmarked for future ventures with old software :)

[@GYTCommnts]

Saved as a "go to" for references and advices when using this INCREDIBLE software. Thanks!

[@Ahayri]

Hey Shelby, it's good to see that you covered projects like PCem and 86Box in your video. In addition, I think you might find DOSBox Pure libretro core using EmuVR (especially after the UGC update) interesting for a future video. You also have a great video about proxy projects like WaybackProxy and ProtoWeb for retro web browsing, but it might be cool to briefly mention these in the video as well for viewers who might be interested.

[@rager1969]

Good to know. I haven't done any PC emulation (not even on my MiSTer), but I just figured DOSBox was the way to go.

[@brianplaysgamesbad]

Nicely done!! This is exactly what I needed for a project! Thank you my man!!! Subbed!

[@lookslikerain75]

This takes me back to my childhood. I used to spend hours just getting hardware to work and games to load off floppy. I never managed to get Microprose F1 to draw the front wheels! Revolt was a great LAN game. Long live the Voodoo II.

[@JonBrase]

17:31 This was around the time that MS switched to the NT kernel for consumer editions of Windows (namely XP home) and games *couldn't* access the hardware directly anymore (software APIs for various things existed before this, but DOS/9x/ME didn't lock user programs out of the hardware, so there was no way to enforce that the APIs were used, and it was always at least a bit faster to go directly to the hardware, so it was hard for APIs to gain traction). Once userspace was locked out of the hardware, forward compatibility was much better (as mentioned, extending basically to the present day). A fair amount of stuff from the XP era will run unmodified today without even needing a VM. Also, as far as the CPU specifically goes, the Pentium IV faceplanted so hard that Intel basically had to go back to the Pentium III for their next generation of CPUs. So the CPUs in service when consumer adoption of 64-bit really got going were fairly close derivatives of the Pentium III (and the transition wasn't very noticeable to users anyways, for the reasons mentioned above), so exact emulation of a Pentium III isn't very important.

[@polygonvvitch]

holy fuck I'm downloading this rn

[@jayqcobhc]

Thank you for the flashback I had from hearing the music in revolt. We often played it back then via LAN…

[@Latchfpv]

Well, it didn't feel like half an hour has passed, but in no time, I'm here with a win98 desktop copying over the folder and getting drivers set up etc, delightful project and I genuinely appreciate the walkthrough as it's been ages since I've dabbled in older hardware and have forgotten so much of it.

[@AnthonyJoesphRabbito]

So very cool! Thank you for contributing as well.

[@teknologyguy5638]

Great and valuable information. Thanks for taking the time to put it all together and share it.

[@phazonclash]

That was a very fun one Shelby, good job brother I've been using 86Box for years now, it's an awesome piece of software

[@bundesautobahn7]

Shelby, you are giving me ideas…

[@Gannett2011]

Great video, as always. I've given it a go, and while the setup is a bit fiddlier than using VMWare or DOSBox, the effort is really worth it.

[@garthhowe297]

Thanks. I'm always interested in software related to vintage computing.

[@joshj88]

You know, I still want a voodoo card and I hate that I got rid of my voodoo 2, but I still love that this is around.

[@RetroTinkerer]

Thanks Shelby! I have to give a try to the latest version using my updated system, the last time I tried my system was not up to the task.

[@andresbravo2003]

I’ve been looking for this!

[@kirknelson156]

somewhere in a box i still have 2 voodoo 2 cards i used to run in SLI mode

[@oldschooldude8370]

Those are worth good money. Especially if they're 12s.

[@systemchris]

Heard of 86box and empc before but great guide and really useful

[@myleft9397]

Great video. Love these shorter ones that explain a software or process

[@msdosm4nfred]

one of the best videos at all and the best advertisement for 86box! Let's make 86Box great again!

[@dougjohnson4266]

Software like 86Box, Vice, and Win/Fs UAE keep the good times going.

[@Okurka.]

Not sure if figuring out the correct port, IRQ and DMA settings was a good time.

[@amak1131]

Honestly, emulation of older systems is SO good you can often get away with just it. Always amazes me I can run an old system on my modern PC.

[@CheesyPotat0]

Emulation is neat. I recently learned people are starting to reverse engineer games and turn them into PC ports. They are doing it with some N64 games. It should be possible to do it with any game for any system. That is wild.

[@Schimz2832]

Nice vid :) Here is my setup : - a 750MB C: for Windows 98 w/ P2 and Voodoo3. - a D: drive for each game. A cool addition is an hidden folder containing a jpeg wich windows looks for desktop wallpaper, that means I have dedicated wallpaper for each game. All this stuff is driven by my own rocketlauncher module. A very simple one : launch 86box with a per game config file.

[@stuarthughes3314]

Excellent video. I recently made the switch from PCem to 86Box as there is so much more hardware available on 86Box now and they are adding more with each release. BUT, as mentioned, it can be a bit overwhelming to choose and know what it all is and does. Would be great if they added a description field or better yet, a photo for each item to help with selection. Alternatively just a wiki page with all emualted hardware. Would really help with deciding on builds. Also, is there a patreon or other way to donate? I'd love to support this excellent project. Keep up the good work!

[@Blazs120gl]

IMHO this system can be an awesome retro games platform. Just like e.g. Shovel Knight running on a NES emulator on any platforms. You can make your custom machine emulation and even program your games _like it's 1999._ You can even implement hardware choices on the game, as if you were playing an VGA or EGA monitor, it could sound differently on different sound cards... It can give an added replay value to be able to play on different hardware options with no hassle.

[@ronny332]

The idea to emulate the own hardware sounds fascinating. I built multiple machines over the last 2 decades that are a kind of timestamp what I used back in the day. Especially for the early Linux days testing it live on the machines is sometimes really hard, especially when you kill something entirely 🙂 I will give 86Box a try, when the time is right.

[@scorch527]

I prefer PCem because it's simply faster. I don't care much about accuracy, I just want to play Interstate 76 smoothly

[@RetroGamingNook]

Great video… brings back a lot of memories working with Windows pre XP. I have not used 86Box yet, only DosBox, PCem and VirtualBox. I think it’s time to virtually create my 1999 build since it bought the farm 14 years ago.

[@spoonified52]

well that just really simplified my retro tower of power I have been designing and planning to build, was going to custom build a case with a built in kvm and probably about 5 motherboards with different configurations of different eras, and since have been working from new to old on that this could be a game changer for me. especially since I just got my P3 based system parts delivered. Even if I build a new system to run this just to do earlier hardware that sounds great. Especially over buying old parts, bench testing, recapping, and crossing my fingers before I am even ready to try it in system I have spent months prepping.

[@gigaherz_]

oh hey, Re-Volt. The first game I ever modded. And I didn't know what modding was, I just edited files until I managed to make my own car that was ... let's say a bit faster than the other options.

[@anonymeister123]

I did the same with Need for Speed II. Such a great time

[@judewestburner]

I know it's slightly different but I have a success story with dosbox. Years ago I used to administer pbx's which were controlled using a modem with dos software. Every time I wanted to do something on them I had to go to the one machine with the software loaded, no remote ability. I tried dosbox to run the software including access to the modem on windows xp. Worked perfectly, after that I could remotely connect to the machine via rdp and administer those PBX's from anywhere.

[@ruben_balea]

I compiled PCem yesterday with a hardcoded Seagate Medalist ST32132A model, firmware and serial number for the ATA IDENTIFY DEVICE command so I could use the same 32 bit disk access driver as on the real hardware, if that driver doesn't find a Seagate drive it disables 32 bit disk access. In the end it seems that the driver had enough with the drive model to "confirm" it was Seagate drive and ignored the firmware and serial number... It would be nice to have an option to choose the hard drive manufacturer/model too, 86Box already has it for CD-ROM drives.

[@dyter424]

My computer has a Ryzen 5 3600XT and, in fact, can't emulate a Pentium II at full speed. I think most users should target a regular Pentium, but even then I hear the sound stuttering right at startup. Maybe emulating a PCI sound card isn't a good idea... Someone even suggested my CPU is too slow (never thought I'd hear a 3600XT called "slow"... it's still more than adequate for most stuff)

[@helldog3105]

I use 86box when I want to quickly test something without pulling a PC off of the shelf in the basement. I try to just use real hardware when I stream, but otherwise something like 86box is an excellent route to go. It does most everything I need. I know there will be cases where it doesn't for people, but I have been impressed with this all the way back to the early releases of PCem. It will be interesting to see where this goes. I would really like to see some more uncommon hardware for 3d acceleration supported, like the Rendition and so on, but I am a patient person.

[@dykodesigns]

86-box is great for getting problematic games to run that have weird compatibility issues (or various bugs). I found it very usefull for some Acclaim games from the mid-90's that are super tricky to get running.

[@Capt.Marco-Hawk-L.L.A.P]

awesome video not sure I would ever use it as I have retro machines, but this has always been in the back of my mind and it's features to me are mind blowing, I still have a box full of old cpu's and have loads 386 chips lol

[@wildgoosespeeder]

My first exposure to emulation of a more authentic Win9x experience was PCem and it does OK. It was fairly easy to set up and understand. However, some pitfalls were noticeable and I heard 86Box does better. However, the hardware selection from PCem didn't exist in 86Box and the setup was more daunting. I just settled on subpar PCem. I think I'll give 86Box another try thanks to this video. I don't care about hardware of the era emulating upgrades. I do want maxed out hardware emulation so I can play games I cannot play on modern hardware using x64 and Windows NT kernel. 3DFX and Pentium I/II it is with SoundBlaster. 128MB RAM and 128GB total storage capacity.

[@cferrarini]

I´m running win98se in a Oracle VirtualBox VM, but this emulator is another beast, so much fine details like bios video cards and chipsets to choose! Amazing! virtualbox has a serious problem with sound glitches and graphics acceleration, there are very few hardware emulation options.. besides that you can take snapshots of the machine states and revert back and forth when things go wrong, its excellent.

[@homelessEh]

there's a perfect Android port of Revolt out there.. and its perfect.

[@Flavorwave_Turbo]

Great video. Good length and well explored. It covers well the era that is most tricky for x86 software preservation that otherwise has people collecting sometimes failing hardware. Win 9x in VMs has never been quite compatible/performant enough to run everything I'd want accurately. The way software was written back then, being able to emu specific era-accurate devices is sometimes crucial.

[@mindaugasstankus5943]

Older or unpopular/unsupported OSes get a lot of (very basic) emulation/translation layers in VMs, never been full on virtualization. VM hardware pass-through and similar are useless if OS do not have (full) support for that hardware. OS may need already dropped legacy or totally different hardware instructions/extensions/protocols.

[@utp216]

I used to love installing Win98 since I had to do it so many times. I’m checking this out so I can do it again! 👍

[@PeranMe]

Awesome… except now my fingers are itching to spend WAAAYYYY too much time trying out pentium-age MS-DOS demos… Thanks a lot for this video, and for your idea of presenting hardware by year, super helpful! Keep being awesome!

[@simplyhard]

Cool! I'm definetly gonna check this out! Thanks!

[@sd30001]

Great explanation! Thank you for sharing! 👏