These projects suffer from very low number of contributors. I'm surprised PCem even lasted that long. I don't really want any new features, I would be happy if the goal of 86Box was just to fix all the bugs reported in Github (and there aren't that many in comparison to e.g dosbox-x). People have their own lives and jobs, we can't expect contributors to work on it full time.
When I evaluated PCem vs 86Box half year ago I chose 86Box as the UI felt more refined and user friendly. Recently it got a new modern virtual machine manager called "WinBox for 86Box" with auto update capabilities. So for me suspension of the PCem project means no change.
I don't blame anyone for the split of PCem vs 86Box. Some contributors tend to have diverging vision for the project and it inevitably leads to a fork. Forking is not bad, it can lead to interesting clones like dosbox-x.
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