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86Box v5.2

October 26, 2025 - written by richardg867

This is the October 2025 update to 86Box, bringing in a few more new features, lots of new machines and the obligatory bugfixes.

Main features

Floppy drive sounds

We often get requests to add ambient sounds, to make emulated setups sound just like real hardware for a more immersive experience. Domppari took the first step towards that by contributing floppy sounds recorded from actual drives, leveraging our accurate floppy emulation to track the drive’s motor and head activity.

These sounds are not enabled by default; they can be enabled through the floppy drive settings by selecting a drive model in the Audio box. Recordings from one 3.5” and two 5.25” drive models are currently available as part of the ROM set.

Other highlights

Many new game port joystick types have been added, between generic options and real models from CH Products and Thrustmaster, expanding upon the previous joystick work led by jriwanek in v5.0.

The Settings window’s machine list is quite overwhelming due to the sheer amount of categories and machine models available. Locating a specific model - when following a guide, for instance - can be tricky, so a search box has been added to help quickly locate any machine by its name or chipset.

Important changes

Machine changes

The IBM PCjr no longer has a floppy drive controller by default. PCjr setups with a floppy drive must now have the FD controller set to Internal device for the drive to work.

Continuing the work started in v5.1, 3 OEM machines (listed in the 686 category below) have moved and are now BIOS variant options for their respective base motherboards. As before, configuration and CMOS data is migrated automatically upon upgrading to v5.2, and if the machine no longer boots, make sure the ROM set is up to date.

On top of that, 5 other machines (listed in the 586 and 686 categories below) have received BIOS updates; however, existing emulated setups will remain on the previous BIOS until an NVRAM wipe is performed, either through the manager’s right-click menu or by deleting the respective .bin file in the machine’s nvr directory.

Host system deprecations

32-bit x86 and ARM32 host systems are no longer fully supported when compiling 86Box from source. Support for these 32-bit architectures has been deprecated for over a year, with builds no longer provided since v5.0; it has now been removed from the source code to allow us to better focus on the relevant x64 and ARM64 architectures.

macOS High Sierra 10.13 and Mojave 10.14 support is still on track to be removed in a future update.

Changelog

Emulator

User interface

Machines

Hardware