86Box v4.2
July 26, 2024 - written by richardg867![](/assets/images/v4.2/hero.png)
This is the July 2024 update to 86Box, bringing new features in the multimedia front, new machines and many bugfixes.
The work-in-progress build currently available to our Patreon supporters will be updated soon. We have a new Patreon preview in our roadmap for the coming months, replacing the Local Switch which will receive a public release, so stay tuned.
32-bit deprecation notice
v4.2 is the final release of 86Box for which 32-bit builds will be provided, for 32-bit x86 on Windows and Linux as well as ARM32 on Linux. By removing these legacy options, we can better focus on maintaining the dynamic recompiler and other architecture-specific portions of our code for the architectures that matter, which are currently x64 and ARM64.
We believe that any host hardware old enough to be incapable of running 64-bit operating systems will not provide a satisfactory emulation experience. Should you have such hardware, the ability to compile 86Box from source for unsupported architectures is not going anywhere, but we cannot guarantee that the dynamic recompiler will remain functional on them.
Main features
Sound: ESS, PAS, SB PCI
Many have requested that we emulate sound cards from ESS; more specifically, their ISA Sound Blaster compatible chips that were very popular throughout the 1990s. This release brings two ESS cards, the AudioDrive ES688 and ES1688. The ES1688 in particular features ESFM, a set of proprietary extensions adding more capabilities to the Yamaha OPL3 synthesizer, supported by some games and for Windows MIDI playback. ESFM emulation uses the ESFMu library developed by Kagamiin, who also did the initial work for adding ESS cards on our end; many retro community members have also contributed to the ESFM reverse engineering effort.
The Media Vision Pro AudioSpectrum family now joins 86Box as well, with the Plus, 16 and 16D. These cards were praised at the time for their high audio quality (not that it matters in an emulated environment), and while they were mostly Sound Blaster compatible, many games and operating systems had native drivers to take full advantage of them. The Plus and 16’s integrated SCSI controller is also emulated, taking the first available channel after any integrated SCSI controller that the selected machine might have, but before any configured SCSI cards.
The Ensoniq AudioPCI emulation was also expanded with Sound Blaster PCI cards based on the ES1373 and CT5880 chips. These were far more common than the previous ES1371 chip, which is better known through VMware’s emulation than real cards. The newer chips are functionally equivalent and allow you to use later Creative drivers for Windows without running into issues stemming from an incompatibility with the ES1371; though be careful with older ES1371-specific drivers, which may recognize the ES1373 but end up in crashes and other misbehavior.
Small but important note: similarly to the AWE64 in v4.1.1, users of the Sound Blaster 16 PnP and Crystal CS4236B should update the ROM set, as accurate Plug and Play ROMs were located. If this update is not present, these cards will disappear from emulated machines and the sound card selector until the ROM set is updated.
Modem
A serial modem is now available as a network card option. This standard Hayes-compliant modem has three modes of operation: dial-up access through SLIP by dialing number 0.0.0.0
, a Telnet client by dialing the address (or address:port
) of a Telnet server, and a dial-in server for receiving calls from Telnet clients or even another 86Box instance. Additionally, a phonebook feature allows for loading a text file with a list of numbers and their respective dialing targets.
As with any hardware of this era, there are many potential gotchas to account for when configuring the modem, all described in the documentation.
Changelog
Emulator
- Added prompt when starting the machine from a new location (similar to VMware) for regenerating MAC addresses
- Added build number and host CPU string information to the configuration file to aid troubleshooting
User interface
- Added approximate year indicators to the list of machine types
- Added interlocks to Voodoo cards and storage device channels to reduce configuration mistakes
- Added performance impact warning to the Softfloat FPU option
- Added new icons to the CD-ROM menu
- Added translation: 🇻🇳 Vietnamese by Barnacl437
- Fixed menus not updating after ejecting a CD-ROM
- Updated translations: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Taiwan)
Machines
- Re-added Compaq Deskpro 386 machine
- Added Pravetz 16S / CPU12 Plus Bulgarian XT clone
- Added Senor Science Co. SCAT-286-003 and Wells American A*Star 286 machines
- Added Acer 100T 386SX machine
- Added DataExpert 386WB and Tandy 4000 386DX machines
- Added Genoa Unknown 486 and Alaris COUGAR 486BL 486 machines
- Added IBM PC 140 (type 6260) Socket 7 machine
- Added missing I/O chip to the Arche AMA-932J
- Added on-board S3 ViRGE/DX video and Crystal CS4236B sound to the Intel AP440FX
- Added on-board Chips & Technologies B69000 video to the ADLink NuPRO-592
- Added more CPU speeds to the Tandy 1000 HX
- Fixed Pravetz 16 / IMKO-4, AMI Super Voyager PCI, Packard Bell PB450 and Dell Dimension XPS Pxxx machines not being selectable on Linux and other case-sensitive systems
- Fixed DEC Venturis 4xx and Rise R534F hanging during POST
- Fixed Micronics M4Li rebooting during POST
- Fixed HP Vectra VL 5 Series 4 not booting
- Fixed Packard Bell PB450 password jumper error
- Fixed FIC PT-2000 hanging after reboot
- Fixed floppy drives not working on IBM PS/1 machines
- Fixed MFM/RLL hard disks not working on the Arche AMA-2010
- Fixed emulator crash while booting the Compaq Presario 2240
- Fixed emulator crash with more than 16 MB RAM on the Amstrad MegaPC
- Fixed keyboard not working with some operating systems on the ASUS P/I-P5MP3
- Fixed hard disk controller error on the Siemens Nixdorf D824
- Fixed BIOS settings not saving on the Radisys EPC-2102
- Fixed incorrect on-board video detection on the IBM PC 330
- Fixed AGP slot incorrectly available (and broken) on the NEC Mate NX MA30D/23D
- Fixed Windows hanging during startup on the FIC VA-502
- Fixed IBM PCjr display glitches in 2-bit mode or with overscan enabled
- Fixed Acer 100T, Commodore SL386SX-25, HP Vectra 486VL and Tyan Trinity 371 on-board device detection issues
- Fixed AMI Apollo not starting up with the minimum 8 MB RAM
- Fixed Olystar LIL1429 filed on the wrong category (now Socket 2)
- Fixed Acer V10 and SiS VL-BUS 471 REV. A1 filed on the wrong category (now Socket 3)
- Fixed Acer M3A, Dell Hannibal+ and ECS P5VX-B filed on the wrong category (now Socket 7 Dual Voltage)
- Renamed DTK 386SX clone to DTK PM-1630C
- Renamed AMA-932J to Arche AMA-932J
- Changed maximum RAM on the IBM XT Model 286 and AT to reflect the base boards’ 640 and 512 KB limits respectively (use ISA memory expansion cards to go beyond that)
- Changed DataExpert SX495 CPU selection to reflect compatible models
- Changed Olivetti M240 BIOS revision to a newer one
Hardware
- Core
- Added Softfloat support to the 8087 FPU
- Upgraded Softfloat FPU to Release 3e
- Fixed hard reset crash on SiS Socket 7 machines
- Fixed emulator crash with RapidCAD CPUs on ARM hosts
- Fixed issues with Lotus 1-2-3 and other applications due to missing FBLD FPU instruction
- Fixed incorrect LOCK instruction behavior on 286 CPUs
- Fixed CPU inaccuracies breaking Microsoft OS/2 2.0 betas
- Fixed OPTi chipset detection by some tools
- Display
- Added ATI VGA Wonder 18800 ISA video card
- Added Bochs SVGA PCI video card
- Added Diamond Stealth64 Video VRAM (S3 Vision968) VLB and PCI video card
- Removed Matrox Productiva G100 video card due to numerous issues
- Fixed VideoMagic Tseng ET4000 cards not being selectable on Linux and other case-sensitive systems
- Fixed emulator crash triggered by mouse movement on the Voodoo Banshee/3
- Fixed random emulator crashes with Matrox cards
- Fixed hard reset crashes with S3 cards and the Voodoo Banshee/3
- Fixed Windows 3.x hanging and resolution switching issues with Matrox cards
- Fixed transparency rendering issues with Matrox cards
- Fixed overscan with Voodoo and Voodoo 2 cards
- Fixed some XGA, ATI Mach8, Mach32 and Mach64 rendering glitches on Windows
- Fixed some resolution-specific rendering issues with S3 Vision cards on Windows
- Fixed some 3D-related issues with S3 ViRGE cards
- Fixed Chips & Technologies B69000 not working with some Windows drivers
- Fixed ATI Mach32 and Mach64 not working with OpenStep drivers
- Changed memory size selection on Tseng ET3000, ET4000, 3dfx Velocity 100 and Voodoo3 1000 cards to address inaccuracies
- Input
- Added 3M MicroTouch serial touchscreen
- Fixed Microsoft SideWinder Pad detection issues on some setups
- Fixed emulator crash when pressing multimedia keys on Windows hosts
- Sound
- Added ESS AudioDrive ES688 and ES1688 ISA sound cards
- Added Pro Audio Spectrum Plus, 16 and 16D ISA sound cards
- Added Sound Blaster PCI ES1373 and CT5880 PCI sound cards
- Improved Sound Blaster AWE EMU8000 synth sound quality
- Fixed Roland MT-32 (New) MIDI emulation not being selectable
- Fixed Sound Blaster Classic and Pro detection by some DOS games
- Fixed Sound Blaster 16 8-bit DMA compatibility mode
- Fixed C-Media CMI8338 and CMI8738 hanging during initialization with some DOS drivers
- Fixed Ensoniq AudioPCI not outputting audio after resuming from sleep mode
- Fixed Sound Blaster 16 PnP and Crystal CS4236B configuration data not matching real cards
- Network
- Added SLIP and Telnet serial modem emulation as a network card option
- Added partial MAC address editing through the Configure window
- Fixed detection of the DEC DE-500A card by some operating systems
- Fixed emulator crash during Windows installation with NE2000-based cards
- Fixed loss of multicast packets (used by AppleTalk and other protocols) in PCap mode
- Fixed PCap mode not detecting Npcap without WinPcap compatibility mode on Windows hosts
- Fixed VDE permission issue when running the switch as an unprivileged user
- Ports
- Fixed ESC/P printer cutting a line of text near the bottom of a page
- Storage
- Added CD-ROM passthrough for real and virtual drives on Windows hosts
- Added Trantor T228 MCA SCSI card
- Added PCjs floppy image support for the current v2 format (replacing the previous v1)
- Added Teledisk 1.x compressed floppy image support
- Added support for tracks with compressed/encapsulated audio or big endian data on cue CD images
- Added writable configuration support to the Monster FDC card
- Added 3.5” 2.88M dual RPM floppy drive option
- Increased SCSI bus speed on NCR 53C860 and 53C875 cards
- Fixed emulator crash when loading ZIP disk images
- Fixed emulator crash when accessing DVD images with some applications
- Fixed CD folder mounting misbehaving on Windows hosts if a file larger than 2 GB is present
- Fixed dynamic VHD images growing uncontrollably during a low level format
- Fixed read errors with some HxC MFM floppy images
- Fixed IDE hard disk detection errors on OpenStep
- Fixed CD-ROM read errors with Mode 2 ISO images
- Fixed ALi IDE driver for Windows 95 on later chipsets
- Fixed I/O timeout issues with some Trantor T130B drivers
- Fixed small inaccuracy with CD-ROM sector headers
- Other
- Added BocaRAM/XT and Lo-tech EMS Board ISA memory expansion cards
- Added IBM XT and AT Memory Expansion Option ISA memory expansion cards
- Added Novell NetWare 2.x Key Card device
- Increased maximum supported memory size to 3 MB on the Everex EV-159 ISA memory expansion card
- Fixed page frame address selection on the Everex EV-159 ISA memory expansion card
- Fixed default configurations for some ISA memory expansion cards