PCem 86Box began as a
fork of
PCem, another open-source IBM PC emulator. PCem was originally developed by Sarah Walker from 2007 until her retirement from the project in 2021, at which point she named Michael Manley as the new project maintainer. Like 86Box, PCem allows users to emulate PC compatibles across a range of
x86 processors—from the
Intel 8088 to the
Pentium II—as well as the ability to emulate
sound cards (such as the
Sound Blaster 16) and
GPUs (including an extremely small number of early
3D accelerators: the S3 ViRGE/325, the S3 ViRGE/DX, the 3DFX Voodoo, and the 3DFX Voodoo2, but no ATI, Nvidia, Matrox, PowerVR, or Rendition chipsets). This versatility allows older PC software with complex hardware requirements to run accurately, in terms of clock speed and multimedia performance, on modern hardware. A benefit of 86Box over mainstream
hosted hypervisors such as
VirtualBox is the ability to run custom
BIOS ROMs. This allows users to closely emulate specific PC compatibles, such as those by
Compaq and
Asus, among others.
Reception PCem has been used by archivists in academic settings to emulate older software for the purposes of displaying historical digital art. Additionally, both PCem and 86Box have been used by
Microsoft to test their archival source code for successful compilation.
PCBox PCBox is a
fork of
86Box, which adds
Pentium III emulation. == See also ==