Jo22 wrote on 2025-05-22, 18:30:

Okay, but you didn't respond to my statement about Windows 3.1x.
The 386 Enhanced-Mode seems to work since about DOSBox 0.65, I still had issues with 0.63 - back then I ran Windows with WIN /S.

386 enhanced mode doesn't come close to the complexity of Win95. Plus again, DOSBox is usually configured with enough physical memory to avoid any need for paging.

Some of the custom builds can run certain versions of Windows 95, also.
In my example, it's Windows 95 RTM if memory serves.
The fact that certain versions of Windows 95 do make trouble and some don't so much do let me question stability of Windows 95.

The version makes absolutely no difference. Even Win32s is enough to cause troubles.

Btw, if this was about OS/2 then I would agree that DOSBox is utterly lacking.
But that's another story, OS/2 was a real operating system with lots of sophistication. 😀

Why is it when Win95 exposes flaws in the CPU emulation, you blame it for being hacky but OS/2 is apparently "a real operating system with lots of sophistication"? This is just biased rubbish without any real facts behind it.

jmarsh wrote on 2025-05-22, 18:41:

Some of the custom builds can run certain versions of Windows 95, also.
In my example, it's Windows 95 RTM if memory serves.
The fact that certain versions of Windows 95 do make trouble and some don't so much do let me question stability of Windows 95.

The version makes absolutely no difference. Even Win32s is enough to cause troubles.

No. That's plain wrong here and that's no opinion, I'm sorry.
I've tried several versions of Windows 95 and they all varied in terms of stability (in DOSBox).
Win32s is a very tricky hack using lots of thunking and causes commercial solutions headaches, even.
No comparison to Windows 95, which is easier to satisfy.
In Virtual PC 2004/2007, it requires hardware-assisted virtualization to get Win32s going.
In other virtualization software it can be other way round, I believe.
Speaking under correction here. It's been years I experimented here.

What are you planning to emulate? If simple programs, maybe PCem can be a decent option if looking at performance and compatibility combined.

If you are looking to game, it's usually better to use modern Windows 10/11 unless you want dithering support desperately.

Also I don't see any emulation of EAX.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-05-22, 17:21:

Hi there! A plain PC/AT Model 5170 is quite straightforward to emulate, I think. 80286 level emulation was provided by Insignia' […]
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Hi there! A plain PC/AT Model 5170 is quite straightforward to emulate, I think.
80286 level emulation was provided by Insignia's SoftAT, SoftWindows 1.x and Windows NT 3.x (RISC) for example.

The 80286 platform was very clean and free of most BIOS extensions.
It was good enough already to run Windows 3.1 and most DOS applications.

an 80286 is a good emulator target, from previous PCem experiments that always seemed fine. There is something almost "pure" about that compared to the complexity of later PC's

UselessSoftware wrote on 2025-05-22, 17:21:

A Dreamcast from 1998 had a 200 MHz RISC processor, and the Playstation 2 from 2000 had a 300 MHz RISC.

On the PC side, by the end of the 90's we had 800 MHz Pentium 3's and over 1 GHz in 2000! On top of that, x86 is like the prime example of a CISC CPU which generally makes instruction decoding more complicated and resource-hungry.

Console hardware always lagged far behind the latest and greatest PCs.

CISC does require complex mapping code in an emulator, though RISC may be "simpler" to implement there is a potential for extra cycles per CISC equivalent instruction. Still, the main point indeed is the CPU of 1999 and the associated components in a PC take a lot of emulation to work in concert

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-05-23, 10:47:

Also I don't see any emulation of EAX.

PCem can emulate the AudioPCI. AudioPCI drivers can EAX 1.0.

leileilol wrote on 2025-05-23, 14:53:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-05-23, 10:47:

Also I don't see any emulation of EAX.

PCem can emulate the AudioPCI. AudioPCI drivers can EAX 1.0.

Didn't try it thinking of emulation on top of emulation

leileilol wrote on 2025-05-22, 02:04:

If you really want "performance" there's BoxedWine, because that's platform agnostic and leverages Wine and OpenGL passthrough combined with CPU emulation (A very enhanced DOSbox core emulating Linux for this). It also gets the pesky part of having a Windows 9X installation out of the way....

I'm having mostly issues with BoxedWine:

For example Ignition 1997 (which is great for these tests, as it has a DOS installer/version, a Win installer/version, and a 3dfx patch version, and has multiple resolutions) flat out couldn't be installed with latest official 2021 build, but works with a newer nightly build I found, except for CD music (probably need something like ogg-winmm.dll).
I did have some crashes though.

OTOH I've a game that won't install from installer (the install window is missing all text, and if I wing it by memory, it never installs), tho it did work if I mounted the install directory.
But then I get the error I know is related to wrong registry entries and I've no clue how to fix that.
After that the game has a CD check and nocd was never made, and from what I've read Wine doesn't handle mounted host CD drives as CDROMs, and I don't know how to install a CD emulator in boxedwine.

The whole experience seems like it should be a simple "install to a container, run the game" but it's really not.

The goal of Boxedwine is late 90's and early 2000's games. Its far from perfect, but it does run quite a few games from that time.

I know I haven't made a release in a really long time, but if you want to play with Boxedwine, the current code/build is pretty stable

https://www.boxedwine.org/v/master/build-122.zip

When it comes to performance, I test a lot with Quake 2 and with OpenGL pass through it is pretty fast. In software mode it is possible to get 60fps at 640x480.

danoon wrote on 2025-05-29, 22:55:

The goal of Boxedwine is late 90's and early 2000's games. Its far from perfect, but it does run quite a few games from that ti […]
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The goal of Boxedwine is late 90's and early 2000's games. Its far from perfect, but it does run quite a few games from that time.

I know I haven't made a release in a really long time, but if you want to play with Boxedwine, the current code/build is pretty stable

https://www.boxedwine.org/v/master/build-122.zip

When it comes to performance, I test a lot with Quake 2 and with OpenGL pass through it is pretty fast. In software mode it is possible to get 60fps at 640x480.

Where can I find the system requirements? I didn't see them on the official website. Thank you.

DoZator wrote on 2025-08-13, 12:14:

Where can I find the system requirements? I didn't see them on the official website. Thank you.

I've never really thought of system requirements.

On https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine, if you scroll down, I show the results of MDK Perf on various platforms.

With MDK Perf a result of 65 was considered a Pentium 166 MHz

Here are a few results

870 Mac Mini M1
133 Raspberry Pi 4 64-bit
985 Win64 build on Windows 10 on Intel i7-6700K
27 Firefox 81 Windows 10 on Intel i7-6700K

These results are pretty old since its been a while since I've done a release, but it should still be close for build-122

In the last year or so Cinebench 11.5 now runs. Even though this is from 2010, its the most modern benchmark I have seen run on Boxedwine.

scores for Cinebench 11.5 win32

5.67 build-122 Win64 on i7-14700
51.97 Without Boxedwine, running on my windows box with an i7-14700

So overall I'm pretty happy Boxedwine ran at 10.9% of the speed of the hardware.

It seems that the "Boxedwine-Web-18R1" version works well on my retro gaming machine, but for some reason it doesn't work the first time:

Otherwise, it runs very smoothly (with a good FPS). The small cursor artifact is not a major issue. The mouse controls work correctly (and so does the keyboard). However, the later versions did not work (perhaps they require a newer browser`s). Additionally, the Windows versions did not work at all. It seems that they require a more recent version of Windows, but I have not yet tested this in XP. Overall, the web browser version seems promising. Thank you again.

DoZator wrote on 2025-08-13, 18:00:

However, the later versions did not work (perhaps they require a newer browser`s)

Latest version

https://boxedwine.org/v/build122ski/boxedwine … i32&p=ski32.exe

Does that link work for you?

This uses multi threading and requires that the webserver set

Header add Cross-Origin-Opener-Policy "same-origin"
Header add Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy "require-corp"

So the newer versions will not work in browser from the local file system

danoon wrote on 2025-08-13, 18:13:

Latest version […]
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DoZator wrote on 2025-08-13, 18:00:

However, the later versions did not work (perhaps they require a newer browser`s)

Latest version

https://boxedwine.org/v/build122ski/boxedwine … i32&p=ski32.exe

Does that link work for you?

No, this version didn't work for me at all, unfortunately: a loading circle appears, followed by "Exception thrown, see JavaScript console". I clicked several times, but to no avail. I also tried other newer versions of browsers (where "Boxedwine-Web-18R1" works well), but they all had the same issue:

Guys, guys...guys. Are we forgetting that we are emulating a PlayStation 3 with rpcs3 on modest hardware? It will be easy to emulate a Pentium 4 3 GHz with a GT 6800 ultra for Windows 98, XP games. Just give it time for pcem.

Magichost wrote on 2025-12-19, 02:38:

Guys, guys...guys. Are we forgetting that we are emulating a PlayStation 3 with rpcs3 on modest hardware? It will be easy to emulate a Pentium 4 3 GHz with a GT 6800 ultra for Windows 98, XP games. Just give it time for pcem.

I'm speaking under correction, but I vaguely remember that the dev of either PCem or 86Box said that Pentium II is the upper practical limit.
Because, from there on, the internal complexity of CPUs had skyrocketed.
Emulating such highly complex CPUs faithfully/authentically is such a hard work to do that it won't gain any performance increase.
Rather contrary, due to the gigantic overhead it will slow things down so much that emulation of a "slower" CPU type will give better performance.

PS: Please note that I said "faithfully". That involves emulating cycle-exact behavior of CPUs, their caching mechanisms, jump predictions etc.
The whole internal workings and how the CPU interacts with the emulated mainboard.

It's not as easy as adding some support for newer x86 instructions of a Pentium 3 or 4 and call it a day.
That's what normal, less accurate emulators do (did).
PCem/86Box are more like BSNES/Higan, I'd say. They try to preserve old PC configurations very accurately.

I know it's not purely emulation, but DDrawCompat has greatly improved compatibility of old Win95/Win98 D3D games into current era systems. Like, a lot lately

danoon wrote on 2025-05-29, 22:55:

The goal of Boxedwine is late 90's and early 2000's games. Its far from perfect, but it does run quite a few games from that ti […]
Show full quote

The goal of Boxedwine is late 90's and early 2000's games. Its far from perfect, but it does run quite a few games from that time.

I know I haven't made a release in a really long time, but if you want to play with Boxedwine, the current code/build is pretty stable

https://www.boxedwine.org/v/master/build-122.zip

When it comes to performance, I test a lot with Quake 2 and with OpenGL pass through it is pretty fast. In software mode it is possible to get 60fps at 640x480.

How's the 3D acceleration in 99/00s games, compared to 86Box or QEMU+3dfx or VM+SoftGPU?
Is there passhtru/HW acceleration in boxedwine?
Is CDDA from host available, or is there a CD emulation possible?

Jo22 wrote on 2025-12-21, 20:55:

It's not as easy as adding some support for newer x86 instructions of a Pentium 3 or 4 and call it a day.
That's what normal, less accurate emulators do (did).
PCem/86Box are more like BSNES/Higan, I'd say. They try to preserve old PC configurations very accurately.

So, any news here, be it emulation, virtualization, passthru tricks, etc?

PCem seems like it's lost it's forum and vNext builds site, and v18 never came to be in the meantime?
86Box had some improvements, tho it still has easy to hit upper limits due to 1:1 emulation.
I have to try boxedwine again.
SoftGPU didn't get anything in 2026 AFAIK - there's something about Hyper-V + QEMU (whpx patch)?

I forgot what WineD3D/Mesa3D for Windows actually does, is it a wrapper?

I know there's a certain troubled dev that has a 3dfx patch for QEMU, but that requires manual builds (or cash), is there an alternative to this by some other community?

Is there something else like boxedwine, like "Proton on Windows" or similar?
And since I mentioned Proton - www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dqHS5YxVqo

I went reading https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/QEMU/Guest_g … cs_acceleration and I'm even more lost, but that is also Linux only, afaik I could just run a Linux distro and Wine instead?

amalahama wrote on 2026-01-13, 11:25:

I know it's not purely emulation, but DDrawCompat has greatly improved compatibility of old Win95/Win98 D3D games into current era systems. Like, a lot lately

Sure, DDrawCompat and a bunch of wrappers (dgvoodoo) are good for quite some time, thing is what if your installer is 16-bit, or has registry peculiarities, and so on?

2mg wrote on 2026-06-11, 08:50:

How's the 3D acceleration in 99/00s games, compared to 86Box or QEMU+3dfx or VM+SoftGPU?
Is there passhtru/HW acceleration in boxedwine?
Is CDDA from host available, or is there a CD emulation possible?

Boxedwine runs Wine which converts DirectX to OpenGL and Boxedwine will pass through the OpenGL commands to the host. There is a some overhead since its an emulator, but overall for early 2000's games its pretty good.

CD emulation isn't in the current release but its on the roadmap. I would imagine it would work like dosbox's cd support with iso and bin/cue.

Current release can be found here https://github.com/danoon2/Boxedwine/releases/tag/26R1.0

2mg wrote on 2026-06-11, 08:50:

Jo22 wrote on 2025-12-21, 20:55:

It's not as easy as adding some support for newer x86 instructions of a Pentium 3 or 4 and call it a day.
That's what normal, less accurate emulators do (did).
PCem/86Box are more like BSNES/Higan, I'd say. They try to preserve old PC configurations very accurately.

So, any news here, be it emulation, virtualization, passthru tricks, etc?

Hi! Um, I read there's UTM for Mac.. But it's basically Qemu with a fron-tend. No 3D acceleration as far as I know.

2mg wrote on 2026-06-11, 08:50:

PCem seems like it's lost it's forum and vNext builds site, and v18 never came to be in the meantime?

The original developer left a few years ago after being treated or feeling being treated, um, not so well.
Part of the story can be read here: PCem v17

2mg wrote on 2026-06-11, 08:50:

86Box had some improvements, tho it still has easy to hit upper limits due to 1:1 emulation.

Yes, the upper limit of 86Box is ca. Pentium II..
Details can be read here: https://86box.net/2022/03/21/why-not-p3.html

2mg wrote on 2026-06-11, 08:50:

I forgot what WineD3D/Mesa3D for Windows actually does, is it a wrapper?

Yes, I think WineD3D wraps Direct3D to OpenGL, while Mesa3D implements OpenGL.

WineD3D was used for the "experimental 3D support" in older releases of Virtualbox (v6.0.24 and earlier) which still had implemented VboxVGA.
WineD3D was from ReactOS project, which at the time aimed to implement an Win NT4/2k compatible OS that also could use NT4/2k device drivers.

Long story short: The guest additions offered 3D support in Windows XP safe-mode, by replacing (overwriting) DirectX system files by WineD3D files.
WineD3D was then used to translate Direct3D to OpenGL.
That way, things could be sent out via the Guest-Host communicatuon channel that Virtualbox had offered through VboxVGA.

Which was great, because it was platform independent. All supported hosts had OpenGL, after all.
Unfortunately, there very security concerns about how VboxVGA works, so it was deprecated and finally removed. 🙁

And since then, 3D acceleration for XP is no more. Just limited Direct3D software rendering as provided by XP itself.
Because so far, no one had written a real 3D graphics driver for XP that supports Virtualbox's VBoxSVGA.

Unfortuntately, Virtualbox mainly cares about business user needs and so there's apparently no need for adding 3D acceleration support in XP.
Which makes me wonder about CAD/CAM software, such as AutoCAD.
Someone sould think that there's some important industry standard software that requires Windows XP with 3D acceleration.

Windows 7 and up didn't ever need the experimental 3D support and are still supported on latest Virtualbox, as far as I know.

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=106674

Mesa3D is used by several other operating systems, I think.
It's basically an functional alternative to what OpenGL32.dll does in Windows NT.

2mg wrote on 2026-06-11, 08:50:

I went reading https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/QEMU/Guest_g … cs_acceleration and I'm even more lost, but that is also Linux only, afaik I could just run a Linux distro and Wine instead?

I think so. The reason why it only works on Linux/Unix hosts is because Linux/Unix support pass-through for PCI(e) devices. Windows hosts don't support that so far.

PS: It's possible to run many 16-Bit Windows applications on 64-Bit Windows by using WineVDM/OTVDM.
It's not a native solution, however. It uses an 286 or 386-ish CPU emulator and parts of WINE to handle Win16 API.

Edited.

Haven't read everything from this forum, but, I have to admit, that 86Box is now MILES or even EONs ahead from PCEM.

I'm a hardcore user of 86Box, that it made me abandon Dosbox. I "insert the " floppy disks" and "CDs" (from images) just like how I used to do it in my real systems. 86Box deeply emulates up to the BIOS levels of the motherboard, soundcards and graphic cards.