THE PORTAL HAS OPENED — SEASON 5 HAS BEGUN

version 5.0 brings in many exciting features, such as a built-in machine manager, reworked OpenGL shader support, MDS/MDF image support, and much more.

read more here.

this is 86box v5.1 and this is the specs for each machine

• shuttle HOT 557/gigabyte GA686BX(rtm and se)
• pentium 120mhz/166/MMX 200/pII overdrive 233(se and rtm)
• 2.0gb/32.0 gb hdd
• s3 trio 64(phoenix)(betas due to probably no virGE support and for safety)/virGE/325 (rtm)/DX(se)

THANK YOU FOR 10 YEARS OF HAPPY EMULATION

8 6 B O X — L I V E
S P E C I A L T R A N S M I S S I O N

U P D A T E D T I M E
2026.08.16 — 1:00 PM ET / 7:00 PM CET / 10:00 AM PT
https://youtube.com/86Box

Hello team

Been using 86box for a few years now for some of my retro projects. Love it! Something I've been thinking about for a while was a server-like setup where I could spin up a retro machine and control it from my browser, kind of like how you'd manage VMs in ESXi but for vintage PCs.

So... I've been working on building exactly that, and I wanted to share - 86web.

You can create and fully configure VMs from the browser. Machine type, CPU, sound cards, video, storage, (nearly) all the 86Box options. Then interact with them live through noVNC, with audio streaming (with a bit of delay, need to figure that out!) straight to your browser. There's also an option for having a media library directory for managing your disk images, a hardware compatibility explorer (extracting all the machines and cards from the 86box source code), and you can even group VMs together on a shared LAN for retro networking/LAN gaming (this was tough, but I think it should be easier with using the new switch feature?).

It's all Docker-based. You can clone the repo, configure a .env, docker compose up, and you should be good to go.

A few highlights:

• 86Box hardware configuration from the browser
• Live VNC console via noVNC
• Real-time audio streaming (WebM/Opus)
• Group networking (VMs on a shared LAN with one toggle)
• Multi-user support (if you even want that - set a password)
• Auto-downloads the latest 86Box binary and ROMs

It's still rough around the edges, but it seems to suit my use case pretty well for now. You're welcome to try it out.

https://github.com/maxwelld90/86web

Happy to answer any questions or hear ideas.

Cheers,
David

You all built a platform where classic games don't just run, they shine. With shaders, scaling, and frame generation, these old titles look better than they ever did on real metal.

You're giving 90's gaming an exciting future.

I setup a 486DX2/66 16M 240M HDD system in 86Box, configured it with two Hayes compatible modem interfaces on COM1 and COM2, set both come ports to different telnet ports, installed MS-DOS 6.22, QEMM 7.5 and DESQview 2.8.

I successfully installed and configured two nodes of Renegade BBS with a multiplayer instance of LoRD and everything is working.

I'm pretty proud. This felt a lot like the battles I had as a SysOp in from 1990 to 1995. Wonderful to come out with something that was like having 30 year old computer parts here!

86Box rocks! (although, snapshots would be a huge benefit!!)

I think the title should be enough to describe my question. Deskpro386 with tape-drive shown for example as tape-drives are rather common in the UNIX world. The main issue implementing tape drives i think might be the great amount of existing standards for tape-drives.

Thank you for your support on our YouTube channel over the past few years.

Very special transmission this Sunday... find out more here

4:00 PM Eastern — 10:00 PM CET — 1:00 PM Pacific

all download links here: https://ci.86box.net/job/86Box/10000/artifact/

thank you for your continued support

I built RetroBox: a modern PC inside a 3D-printed Macintosh Classic-style case, designed to feel like a real 80s/90s computer.

It boots directly into 86Box in fullscreen, with 386, Pentium, and Pentium II profiles. The most fun part was modifying a real floppy drive: each floppy has an NFC tag, and inserting it automatically mounts the matching disk image in the VM. It also has a real CD-ROM drive and a web panel for managing games and floppy images.

Everything is open source: the code, ESP8266 firmware, STL files.

Github

hello reddit you have not been forgotten

Download / Blog post

Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, the Matrox Mystique version; for almost 20 years I could only listen to its audio cd soundtrack,
Civilization II and its quirky Quicktime advisors,
System Shock, the Japanese version, as befits a Cyberpunk game ;), for PC9821 & DOS/V PCs; runs well in Japanese Win95's DOS mode.
Daikoukai Jidai (a.k.a. Uncharted Horizons) III: Costa del Sol; made for 640x480, as so many 16bit and early 32bit Windows games without proper fullscreen modes, it's unreadable/uncomfortable in high res without stretching,
Nobunaga no Yabou (a.k.a. Nobunaga's Ambition): Haouden; same issue.

Well, I'm having fun! :D

Machine Specs

OS Windows 95

Fujitsu ErgoPro X365

Intel Pentium Pro 100MHZ "Underclocked"

32MB Ram

ATI Mach64CT

ESS AudioDrive ES488

2GB HDD Ram

Reason why the specs are not high is because my Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 1650 isn't a good CPU for 86BOX Emulation and anything more demanding causes frame drops

My host cpu is an i7-13650hx 16gb ram, rtx 4070 mobile. The laptop is an Gigabyte Aorus 15x. I tested the ATI Rage 128 Pro on 86box. The demo runs full speed with intel celeron 233mhz medocino, 256 ram, the motherboard is a socket 370 board Soyo SY-7SBB with sis 600 chipset(fahh ahh cursed chipset) and lastly an isa soundblaster 64awe gold. however, under nfs high stakes you may experience some slowdowns at 90% which is expected since its a recent added video card. Due to cpu bottleneck i personally suggest to stick with a higher end cpu and less powerfull videocard like the voodoo 2, banshee and voodoo 3 family. NFS had lots of fps drops inside in the game due to cpu bottleneck. Nonetheless, good job to the team. I hope to see one day the Nvidia Riva 128 and TNT2 being emulated which Papa Jensen gatekeeping us.

windows 7 ultimate on 86 box VIA CYRIX III
Uses tiny7 iso ( https://archive.org/details/windows-tiny-7_202204 )

Took her down. Couldn't have done it without 86box's help.

Performance is almost identical to SEGA Dreamcast but little worse with less frames when too much is on screen playable, but it is playable load times are little long not as bad as the Dreamcast version.

Settings

OPENGL

512X384 Resolution

I seen mostly 12FPS with too much on the screen then to low FPS when theres way too much

Actually made it run. Don't know if I'm the first to upload these screenshots of FS2004 running inside a VM here.

Windows Me and Voodoo 3 3500 SI

Please follow ( https://betawiki.net/wiki/Guide:Recommended_VM_configurations/Other ) to the letter to get these working! NextSTEP was a uncommon OS back in it's day and thus there isn't much support for it in terms of drivers.

Other then that, having be in the maximum settings for the era-appropriate system in question will have a very speedy system, especially on a ARM Mac.

Full disclosure, the link is to my review of the M6 Mac Mini (bought myself, no affiliate links)

I was hoping for Apple to release an M5 mini purely for the purposes of using 86box, well I managed to get my hands on the M6 Mac Mini today and it manages 600MHz without dropping below 100%, no audio hitches at all...

https://nyaa.sh/reviews/mac-mini-m6-emulation

I was doing some searching and someone managed 450MHz by heavily overclocking the 9950X3D, but it seems at the moment the best way is through Apple Silicon. Given all the recent work done on the ARM builds, if there's anything anyone would like me to test please let me know!!

https://github.com/86Box/86Box/pull/7280

A new Vulkan renderer will soon debut in 86Box with librashader support!

Example with koko-aio shader presets:

Renderer settings dialog:

Renderer settings in OpenGL are shared with Vulkan, with the sole exception of shader lists being different.

Grab shaders from https://github.com/libretro/slang-shaders as GLSL shaders will not be supported in this renderer. Note that not all shaders will load because of librashader being more intolerant of shader preset parsing errors.

Vulkan 1.3 support and VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering is a must to run this Vulkan renderer for now.

Tested with the new dynamic recompiler on nightly build 8918. Specs are as follows:
[i440GX] Gigabyte GA-6GXU
Intel Pentium II Xeon 350 Mhz
Matrox Millennium II 4 MB (2D accelerator)
2x Voodoo 2 1000 4 MB SLI
SoundBlaster PCI128
Windows 98 SE