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86Box v4.2

July 26, 2024 - written by richardg867

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

User interface

Machines

Hardware