That's not possible, you are restricted to the ones included. It's quite a huge list, you can probably find something very close to your target machine. There's no way to switch machines, you need to use a manager such as Winbox.

https://github.com/86Box/WinBox-for-86Box

Norton Commander wrote on 2023-04-11, 21:32:

That's not possible, you are restricted to the ones included. It's quite a huge list, you can probably find something very close to your target machine. There's no way to switch machines, you need to use a manager such as Winbox.

https://github.com/86Box/WinBox-for-86Box

That's quite unfortunate, from what I understand, WinBox is on Windows, which I do not use 😀)

As for my target machine, I need the exact BIOS - to test which SoftPaqs would work for my particular machine, for example. I think it's a missed opportunity, because one could build their entire HDD on the VM and just deploy it on a CF, place it in the real hardware where it would just work 😀) but well, if it can't be done, so be it.

Duh, I missed that your are on MAC. 86Box can be used with different VMs by specifying it in the command line:

86Box -C config.cfg or 86Box -P path/to/vm

The default name for the config is CONFIG.CFG but you could rename it so you could multiple configs and launch the one of your choice. This is how I use DOSBox.

Norton Commander wrote on 2023-04-12, 17:33:

Duh, I missed that your are on MAC. 86Box can be used with different VMs by specifying it in the command line:

86Box -C config.cfg or 86Box -P path/to/vm

The default name for the config is CONFIG.CFG but you could rename it so you could multiple configs and launch the one of your choice. This is how I use DOSBox.

Thanks, friend. That definitely makes my life easier.

songoffall wrote on 2023-04-11, 23:41:

As for my target machine, I need the exact BIOS - to test which SoftPaqs would work for my particular machine, for example. I think it's a missed opportunity, because one could build their entire HDD on the VM and just deploy it on a CF, place it in the real hardware where it would just work 😀) but well, if it can't be done, so be it.

That would be nice! Unfortunately you'd probably need a fairly accurate emulation of your machine and all of its devices to be able to test that in a useful way, and there are so many machines that have existed with so many different devices, each of which requires at least a little work to emulate, sometimes a lot of work. For those of us who don't have the knowledge and/or time to write our own emulation, we just have to hope that someone who does happens to be interested enough in our particular model to emulate it!

doshea wrote on 2023-04-22, 03:22:

songoffall wrote on 2023-04-11, 23:41:

As for my target machine, I need the exact BIOS - to test which SoftPaqs would work for my particular machine, for example. I think it's a missed opportunity, because one could build their entire HDD on the VM and just deploy it on a CF, place it in the real hardware where it would just work 😀) but well, if it can't be done, so be it.

That would be nice! Unfortunately you'd probably need a fairly accurate emulation of your machine and all of its devices to be able to test that in a useful way, and there are so many machines that have existed with so many different devices, each of which requires at least a little work to emulate, sometimes a lot of work. For those of us who don't have the knowledge and/or time to write our own emulation, we just have to hope that someone who does happens to be interested enough in our particular model to emulate it!

yeah, but with PCEMU/86BOX you could essentially make a custom PC build, except for the base computer/hardware identifiers/BIOS itself. Two Pentium II computers aren't that different from each other in the sense that you didn't have so much hardware integrated in the chipset as you do now. The other devices would sit on the PCI/ISA buses, so in my case you'd need the Compaq ROM, an IDE adapter and a Matrox MGA Mystique onboard graphics on PCI, PS/2, COM, LPT, USB 1.0 controllers and that's it, pretty standard stuff. At least that's how I see it.