86box has more features, and the latest version comes with a frontend. PCem updates are long in coming, making its forks preferable (just like DOSBox).

I've used DosBox, VMware, VirtualBox, MSDOS(vm), 86box and PCem to run DOS stuff on non-DOS systems. I still do most with
DosBox, but for faking a "real" system, I've settled more on PCem. I found 86box tougher to setup and tweak, but it really
depends on what you are doing. If you need to get optimal performance/compatibility (like much gaming), you prob would do
better with the more capable/complex ones - I'm mostly just testing stuff I've written an typical old systemss, and
find PCem best (for me). I don't really care about slow release times - The systems I'm testing on haven't been "released"
in decades - so far not encountered any critical bugs which need immediate fixing.

So I scoped out 86Box recently, and was enormously impressed. It now lets you mount folders from the host system in the virtual CD-ROM drive which is a convenience I'd been longing for. I was curious if the mouse felt any better, and I didn't think so? But it seemed no worse than before, and about the same as PCem. I don't know, maybe my system isn't fast enough to benefit from that. I only have a 5800X3D. The shaders for 86Box are nice too. If you use the OpenGL renderer you can specify the GLSL shaders you want to use directly from the application. If you use the Vulcan renderer you can use something like Reshade to get really fancy.

Performance for me seemed the same as it ever was. PCem and just about any version of 86Box seems to max out around a P233 MMX for my host system. There might be some changes in performance on the margins, but I wouldn't expect a new class of performance out of any version of these.

I use 86Box on Linux because it has a flatpak available.

For networking PCEM only has 10 Mbit support while 86Box has 10/100 Mbit support.

Huh? No Gigabit ethernet yet? How comes?
Doesn't, for example, Intel Gigabit-Ethernet-Controller 82574L have DOS support?

I mean, 10 or 100 MBit/s isn't exactly much.
If you divide by 8 (Bit to Byte), it's about 1,2 Mbyte per second, or 12 MByte per second, respectively. On paper, without overhead.

In practice the bandwidth is about a bit it more than half of that.
So 700 KB/s (a DD diskette) or 7 MB/s. Not exactly quick.

Way back in the 2000s I found it funny that DSL was slower than transfer rate of a floppy controller.
Or that then-fast 10MBit cable internet connection was the maximum speed of an 10Base2 NE2000 card from 1987.
Even ISA bus from 1984 was faster than that (16 MBit/s theoretical).

Edit: I did’t meant to criticise the authors of PCem/86Box here.
I've just assumed that various network adapters had been emulated a dozen times in the past 25 years or so (in different projects)..

As far as I know, there haven't been any changes to 86Box's underlying emulation performance, so PCem should still provide somewhat better performance.

Honestly, in 2025 I’d lean toward 86Box for gaming. PCem was solid back in the day, but it hasn’t had a proper update in years. 86Box v5 looks like it actually fixes a lot of rough edges, smoother mouse, better display output, more hardware options, which matters a lot if you’re running games on Win95/98/XP.

PCem might still work if you already have everything set up and tuned perfectly, but for new setups or better compatibility, 86Box seems like the safer bet now. I’d try it out with one of your old configs and see how it feels, chances are it’ll handle your games just as well or better.

I personally use dosbox-staging for gaming (due to the dynamic shaders) and 86Box for MS-DOS development (serial support FTW).

But if you don't want to use dosbox, then PCem and 86Box are mostly equivalent, with PCem being a little faster if you are emulating powerful systems (from P90 onward), probably at the expense of some accuracy. The biggest difference you are going to find is the UI, honestly.

I have only tried PCem and while it was great, i noticed it corrupted my images, which was a real pain because I had to reinstall EVERYTHING all over again, then I gave it, but this was a few versions ago.. or maybe I was doing something wrong. Either way was fun, I even setup an OS2 Warp setup to try it out

86Box has come a long way and is continuously updated. I can even run a Pentium II 233MHz with Voodoo 3 at 99 - 100% all the time without stutters in my Ryzen 7 8845HS laptop.

Of course, for hardcore demanding 3D Win9x era games, I'm using QEMU with SoftGPU.

But for the rest, the Voodoo emulation is good enough, and I mostly play the RTS games in the Pentium II "system" - like Fate of the Dragon.

It's my go to emulator for all my PC needs. I spend more time with 86Box than tinkering with real classic PC because of the convenience of trying out different "systems" even during work breaks using my laptop.

And 86Box now supports way more, more systems and hardware than PCem.

I'm using Debian and using the nightly latest AppImage build of 86Box from Jensen website.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-09-06, 22:16:

Huh? No Gigabit ethernet yet? How comes?
Doesn't, for example, Intel Gigabit-Ethernet-Controller 82574L have DOS support?

I mean, 10 or 100 MBit/s isn't exactly much.

Gigabit Ethernet wasn't really a thing during DOS and Win98 times, nor were multi-gigabyte games, therefore 100 Mbits should be enough for everyone 😀

Azarien wrote on 2025-10-12, 16:37:

Jo22 wrote on 2025-09-06, 22:16:

Huh? No Gigabit ethernet yet? How comes?
Doesn't, for example, Intel Gigabit-Ethernet-Controller 82574L have DOS support?

I mean, 10 or 100 MBit/s isn't exactly much.

Gigabit Ethernet wasn't really a thing during DOS and Win98 times, nor were multi-gigabyte games, therefore 100 Mbits should be enough for everyone 😀

I know, I know.. 😅

But from my perspective, 10/100 MBit wasn't that much even in the 90s if we consider CD-ROM (24x speed in '97=5 MB/s) or HDD speeds (ATA 33 in '97= 33 MB/s).

Now, 10 MBit/ts is about a humble Megabyte per second - an 3,5" floppy, 100 MBit/s about 10 MB. Not much, really.

That's why game cartridges (NES to N64) were also measured in MBit - it looked more impressive from a marketing point of view.

The whole technology back then was artificially being limited, I think.
Or rather, being used in a sub optimal way. Because it wasn't being seen as useful to fully utilize it, maybe, not sure. 🙁
- Nowadays, where I live, there are still elderly people that don't see the point in anything better than DSL.
They boycott or vote against fibre and cable internet installations in buildings, too.

Speaking of cable internet, ordinary coaxial cables, as used by cable TV companies, easily have a frequency bandwidth of a Gigaherz or more.
Ordinary, vintage coaxial cable used by 10Base2 (1980s Cheapernet) is about same thing, it's justvcoax cable (bog standard RG58 with 50 ohms in this case).

Radio amateurs use RG58 and other coaxial cables for a hundred years to connect their radio transceiver to the antenna,
which is not seldomly 30 metres apart from the desk were the radio sits.
They also use the cheap RG58 for UHF (70cm band) and microwave links (23cm),
with noticeable increase in losses on the higher bands, of course.

So it technically was no problem to have a 500 MBit/s or 1 GBit/s network connection in 1994.
The physical wiring (coax) was not the bottleneck, but rather the computer bus (ISA, MCA, VL bus etc) and the NIC itself.

Even with losses, individual segments of 10m could easily been operated at full speed.
A network connection with larger distances merely would have needed active hubs, bridges or routers.
But the physical medium available at time was up to it in principle, though.

Same goes for optical connections, by the way.
Fibre ISDN was limited to 64 KB per channel, maybe, but that was the electronics.
The module unit, which was replaceable. The 1980s optical fibre itself was capable of higher speeds than DSL ever was.
Way back in the 1970s/1980s, already. Technology was artificially held back.

Same goes for MS-DOS itself, by the way. By 1984, Microsoft tried to get rid of it already.
MS-DOS 2 adopted Unix technology, because it was meant to fuse with Xenix to a DOS/Unix hybrid.
Edit: XEDOS, I meant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo8NG8T4rWs
Windows 1.0 merely was a stop-gap solution from very start.
But then OS/2 got delayed and history changed.

By late 80s/early 90s, after so many years of waiting, PC users had gotten accustomed to MS-DOS and its limitations.
When the 32-Bit DOS Extenders/V86 Memory Managers then arrived in early 90s, MS-DOS suddenly nolonger was seen as so bad anymore.

Eventually, long time users even wanted to keep using DOS and avoid using GUIs;
which no sane PC user in 1985 would ever have felt like.

So yeah.. Everything sort of was being delayed, but people didn't realize.
In 1995 we basically were where we should have been by ~1985 already.
- The investment in telecommunications had happened too slow.

Ordinary TV satellites of the 1980s had reserved about 6 to 10 MHz per TV channel and their transponders could have had handled several dozen to hundreds of these TV channels.
(Bandwidth per transponder was 36 MHz to 500 MHz depending on satellite band).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transpond ... nications)

- Now let's compare this to average year 2000 ADSL phone lines with a frequency bandwidth of 100 KHz to 1.1 MHz.. 😟
The extreme differences here are just hard to grasp. Between what was possible and what was actually available, I mean.

In principle, we could have had network connections in LANs with 10 MByte/s per second by 1990.
The technology was known and available, but not used.
Instead, cheap copper wire was used for infrastructure: Twisted-pair, telephone lines. Telegraph lines. WW1 field cables used in the trench. Bell wire. Sigh! 😮‍💨

Jo22 wrote on 2025-10-12, 19:33:

... But from my perspective, 10/100 MBit wasn't that much even in the 90s ..

I think if really depends on "perspective" - Some of us "grew up" in computing having to transfer stuff between systems via floppy, or (after our setups became more capable) RS-232 cables. (I originally developed what eventually became the "NewBridge 10xx series of data-switches" so that I could connect all the systems in my basement together and have then "talk" to each other)

Original 10mbps Ethernet (over coax) was a godsend.

I still run 10m on most of my DOS systems - some have 10/100 - but I never have to move all that much data between them.
For years, DOS capped out at 500m drives (and earlier versions even smaller) - now there are versions that can go bigger...

The most common network traffic I do these days in DOS is moving a 1.44m floppy disk image from my ImageDisk system to a more modern one.
Takes a couple seconds - MUCH better than the old serial transfer (couple MINUTEs - if you could get it to work at 115200 direct transfer ... my serial data switch maxed at 19200, transferring an image took HOURs.

DaveDDS wrote on 2025-10-14, 15:16:

Jo22 wrote on 2025-10-12, 19:33:

... But from my perspective, 10/100 MBit wasn't that much even in the 90s ..

I think if really depends on "perspective" - Some of us "grew up" in computing having to transfer stuff between systems via floppy, or (after our setups became more capable) RS-232 cables. [..]

Hi, I did that, too! 🙂 I loved building the simple "3-wire" cables and run them around the house.
There were small DOS TSRs that made one PC's HDD appear as a drive letter on the other PC, I remember.
At one point, I vaguely remember, I had a little mailbox running and a second computer with RS-232 served as a network drive.

On other hand, I was a fan of shareware CD-ROMs too by the mid-90s..
Perhaps that's why I had a different perspective on things.
I mean, if you have a shelf full of 650 MB discs each..

Then, there was this Channel Videodat thing from 1990 onwards that was being adverised on computer shows on TV.
It allowed receiving shareware via TV channel, basically. Using a similar technology that Teletext did.
Slow by today's standard, but faster than a phone line connection with an ordinary 14k4 data/fax modem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgCqSX-cOvk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiKAG-HSCIw

Another high-speed thing that comes to mind is FireWire (as a technology).
It appeared in late 90s and allowed up to 400 MBit/s connection, faster than NICs.
It could be even used as a TCP/IP network connection between two PCs, like a cross-over cable between two NICs.
Windows XP supported this kind of connection out-of-box, I remember.
Later on, FireWire could do up to 800 MBit/s, too, but popularity already had declined due to USB 2.0 (480 Mbit/s) and Gibabit NICs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1394#General_networking

Last but not least, where I live, there originally was a plan to start to build a fibre network for telecommunications by the 1970s already.
Unfortunately, the money intended for the project was spent on build cable TV network.
A summary can be read here.

Some of my fellow citizens are still sad about how things went.
Mainly because dumb television won over intelligent telecommunications, I assume.
If history had been different here, we would have had ended up with ISDN much sooner or would have gotten a better technology by then, even.

Not that ISDN was bad - 64 KBit/s per channel was fine by 1980s standards.
Japan also did experiment with ISDN since the early 1980s, after all.
But it wasn't until the ~ mid-1995 that it was available in many cities in my country.
Before, it was merely being available experimentally or in selected regions/cities.

And it wasn't until 1999/2000 when we finally got DSL over here.
Followed by cable TV internet soon after, I think.
The average users were still thinking that ISDN was cutting-edge at the time.
In parts because internet wasn't "on radar" yet when ISDN started to be deployed.

(I mean, to be fair, 128 KBit/s by combining two 64 KB ISDN lines was quite common
and appearing to be fast enough, considering the basic HTML pages of the time.)

So by mid-90s, over here, most people were already proud to have analogue telephones that can do modern DTMF dialing (tone dialing).
Which was very useful for then-new voice computers on phone that required to enter a number.
("Please press 1 if you have questions for ABC,
or press 2 if you have questions for DEF or press 3 if you have other questions.. Press 0 to get back to main menu.."

Without it, on a pulse-dialing operated phone, a small DTMF generator meant for an answering machine had to be held next the handset.
Edit: The device did look like this

By early-mid 90s, pulse dialing still was considered being "normal" or the standard where I live.
Telephones could do both (via switch), but most PBX systems weren't ready for it, for example.
The use of pulse-dialing especially was apparent when looking at old magazines or those Minitel/BTX type of terminal programs, I think.
They always had ADTP string..

Anyway, I merely try to explain why I think that some things were a bit frustrating.
Quite a few things were unecessarily being delayed or not being invested in.
At least were I live. Not that I don’t like robust/simple technology, but digital technology was a bit necleted, I think.
Both should have been available simultanously without competing.

The importance of things like fibre or broadband telecommunications was at least kind of foreseable by the mid-80s already.
When thing such as the Amiga or Macintosh started to become well known by the average person, even.

Edit: I forget to mention, there had been physical wire connections (broadband) that could be rented from our national teleco.
They were basically being electrically connected, like a landline connection,if I understand correctly.
We also had equivalent to a T1 line, I think. But that wasn't available to/affordably by ordinary citizens.
Universities, schools, businesses.. They likely had such things in the 90s already.

Edit: Speaking of emulated NICs, this article is an interesting read.
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/emulating-etherlink/

The 3C501 is known for the comments made about it by Donald Becker, the author of many Linux networking drivers in the mid-1990s: “Don’t purchase this card, even as a joke.” The comments were not unjustified when they were made; the 3C501 was already an obsolete design in 1992 or so. The problem was that the card has a tiny buffer, only big enough for one packet, and three mutually exclusive modes: Send, receive, and buffer access by the host (obviously no full-duplex Ethernet there). Once a packet is received, further reception stops until the packet buffer is emptied by the host and receive re-started again. That leads to many dropped packets and very poor performance in busy networks, particularly networks with a lot of broadcast or multicast traffic.

Fortunately, the virtual switch in a hypervisor has the ability to buffer packets, and packet loss is far less of a problem in a VM. Which is not to say the emulated EtherLink is some kind of a great performer, but it can certainly handle much more than 10Mbps.

So I suppose that modern emulators can do improve network performance, too? 🙂
If even an ancient design of ~1985/1986 can be made do more than 10 MBit/s, I mean.
The chip design dates back to 1982, my bad.