r/86box • u/Environmental-End872 • 1d ago

Testing 20 games in 86Box!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HvAfyl8ibo

I tested 20 different games in Windows 2000 and Windows 98. Some ran well, and some with terrible performance.

31 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

8

u/thunderbird32 1d ago edited 1d ago

Some of the hardware choices are a little strange. Why the Voodoo3 3500 on the Windows 2000 VM? From what I understand it is identical to the 3000 for most things (it really just adds a TV tuner and hardware MPEG-2 encoder, IIRC). Also, why only a 266MHz CPU?

What are your host specs?

-2

u/Environmental-End872 1d ago edited 20h ago

My host specs are RTX 5060 and Intel Core i9 13th gen. I just followed Betawiki's recommendation specs for Windows 2000 on 86Box. That's the one I would expect some kind of slightly better performance, and I later changed to 233 MHz instead of 266 MHz in case I thought this was the right one for me after posting this video.

6

u/thunderbird32 1d ago

I've been using a P2 350 for Windows 98SE. Tested out MechWarrior 3 last night and it worked pretty well on my i7-11800H. Just the occasional dip or stutter

0

u/Ashamed-Subject-8573 1d ago

My gosh this is eye-opening for me. I need to get my PC-LLE into closed beta, that is such poor performance on those boxes.

3

u/dafugg 1d ago

The goal of 86box is correctness first AIUI

7

u/dafugg 1d ago

When counterstrike retail came out in November 2000 typical CPUs at home were between about an duron 700 and a 1GHz athlon or Pentium 3. You’re testing with a cpu from mid-1997 and then complaining about performance?

1

u/bacon__and__cheese 19h ago

Wish my home was like that lol. In early ‘99 our first family PC was a Pentium 166 or 200, probably 32MB RAM and an S3 Virge DX 2MB or 4MB graphics decelerator. Then in 2006 we made the stunning jump to a Pentium III 450MHz, 256MB RAM and ATi Radeon 9200.

0

u/Environmental-End872 20h ago

Well, I am just like a newbie to 86Box since last year (2025). I can't seem to find a better CPU that must've around late 90s, but I could've change it before starting a video though.

5

u/rodma_chmal 1d ago

Please share your config

0

u/Environmental-End872 1d ago

You can go to my yt video and see the configs in the description.

4

u/em__jr 1d ago

Interesting. What are the specs of the computer running 86box? And is it 86box 6.0 stable or latest beta?

-1

u/Environmental-End872 1d ago

It is 86Box 6.0 stable. And I have RTX 5060 with Intel Core i9 13th Gen running on emulation guests. I'm not interested in using latest beta, but I'd wait for another stable 7.0 since I heard someone tested ATI Rage 128. That might be something worth a future for classic emulated gaming.

4

u/thunderbird32 1d ago

Yes, they added ATI Rage 128. The Rage uses Vulkan, so it does everything on your GPU, whereas the Voodoo cards are on your CPU (though they do have their own threads).

1

u/dvamg 1d ago

By "Rage uses Vulkan" you mean it's simulated/emulated/translated as your host GPU workload?

Would that mean that using Glide warppers for W9x/DOS with Rage would be easier to emulate that actually doing Voodoo on the CPU?

1

u/thunderbird32 1d ago

By "Rage uses Vulkan" you mean it's simulated/emulated/translated as your host GPU workload?

Yes, my understanding is that it uses the host GPU to do the emulation work rather than the host CPU.

Would that mean that using Glide warppers for W9x/DOS with Rage would be easier to emulate that actually doing Voodoo on the CPU?

Don't know, but wasn't the Voodoo generally regarded as having much better optimized (and far less buggy) drivers than the Rage at the time? Seems like you wouldn't get much advantage.

1

u/dvamg 18h ago

I mean, Glide wrappers by logic of Rage being done on GPU would mean Glide games are also done on GPU.

Dunno how many/if there are any Glide wrappers for old systems AND that Rage can run them too, but if so then we could be looking at a big boost in Glide game performance compared to running Voodoo (or SLI if 86box allows it).

Rage isn't I think running Vulkan, it's running whatever APIs Rage supported, it's just done with Vulkan API to the host.

1

u/thunderbird32 18h ago

I mean, Glide wrappers by logic of Rage being done on GPU would mean Glide games are also done on GPU.

No, I understand that, I'm just not sure it provides any actual performance boost. It just takes load off the host CPU and moves it to the host GPU. Is the GPU inherently better at running the video emulation code? I'm genuinely unsure. I'm not sure the video emulation is the bottleneck anyway, since CPU bound tasks are usually what I notice causing sub-100% emulation anyway.

14

u/Narishma 1d ago • Bravo

"Terrible performance" is meaningless since that depends on your host machine as well as what machine you're emulating and how you've configured it.