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. For more information, see the LICENSE file.

The project maintainer is OBattler.

If you need a configuration manager for 86Box, use the 86Box Manager, our officially endorsed 86Box configuration manager, developed by Overdoze (daviunic).

Community

We operate an IRC channel and a Discord server for discussing anything related to retro computing and, of course, 86Box. We look forward to hearing from you!

Getting started

See this page on our website for a quick guide that should help you get started with the emulator.

Building

In order to compile 86Box from this repository, please follow this step-by-step guide:

1. Download the development environment from http://tinyurl.com/de86box. Afterwards, extract it to your desired location. Of course, also clone the repository in your desired location. Downloading ZIPs is not recommended, as it makes it more inconvenient to keep the code up-to-date. To avoid issues, make sure neither path has spaces in it.
2. In the extracted environment folder, you will find a script called mingw32_shell.bat. Launch it. There are other shell launching scripts in there, but you should not use them.
3. Once launched, run pacman -Syuu in order to update the environment. Depending on the state of the downloaded DE, you may need to run it twice (once initially, and then again after re-entering the environment). Make sure to keep the enviroment up-to-date by re-running the command periodically.
4. Run the following commands to install the missing packages:
   • pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-libpng
   • pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-freetype
   • pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-ghostscript
   • pacman -S mingw-w64-i686-SDL2
5. Once the environment is fully updated, cd into your cloned 86box\src directory.
6. Run make -jN -f win/makefile.mingw to start the actual compilation process. Substitute N with the number of threads you want to use for the compilation process. The optimal number depends entirely on your processor, and it is up to you to determine the optimal number. A good starting point is the total number of threads (AKA Logical Processors) you have available.
7. If the compilation succeeded (which it almost always should), you will find 86Box.exe in the src directory.
8. In order to test your fresh build, replace the 86Box.exe in your current 86Box enviroment with your freshly built one. If you do not have a pre-existing 86Box environment, download the latest successful build from http://ci.86box.net, and the ROM set from https://tinyurl.com/rs20191022.
9. Enjoy using and testing the emulator! :)

If you encounter issues at any step or have additional questions, please join the IRC channel or the appropriate channel on our Discord server and wait patiently for someone to help you.

Nightly builds

For your convenience, we compile a number of 86Box builds per revision on our Jenkins instance.

Regular	Debug	Optimized	Experimental

Legend

• Regular builds are compiled using the settings in the building guide above. Use these if you don't know which build to use.
• Debug builds are same as regular builds but include debug symbols. If you don't need them, you don't need to use this build.
• Optimized builds have the same feature set as regular builds, but are optimized for every modern Intel and AMD processor architecture, which might improve the emulator's performance in certain scenarios.
• Experimental (Dev) builds are similar to regular builds but are compiled with certain unfinished features enabled. These builds are not optimized for maximum performance.

Donations

We do not charge you for the emulator but donations are still welcome: https://paypal.me/86Box .