86Box v5.3

December 21, 2025 - written by richardg867

This is the December 2025 update to 86Box, bringing in performance improvements, bugfixes and some new hardware for the holidays.

Main features

Several small and localized performance improvements have been made to emulation performance, including a new C runtime library for Windows host systems, optimizations to the “new” dynamic recompiler used on ARM and Apple Silicon host systems, as well as multithreading improvements to Voodoo and other video cards. We remain engaged in investigating more potential performance improvements for the next release.

The floppy drive sounds feature added last release got a big update, with improved accuracy especially in head seeks, and new recordings from two 3.5” and three 5.25” floppy drives. The recordings have been moved to a new package outside of the ROM set, so read below for more information before upgrading.

Important changes

Asset pack and floppy sounds

Due to its large size, the floppy drive sound collection has been moved out of the ROM set and into a new asset pack, which is now included with release versions of 86Box downloaded from GitHub, as the assets folder inside the .zip on Windows, or embedded within the AppImage on Linux or the app bundle on macOS. Linux packages may or may not include the asset pack; we recommend maintainers to include it in /usr/share/86Box/assets as part of the standard 86Box package.

If you use our experimental builds or any other package without the asset pack, floppy sounds will not be available until you install the pack the same way you would install the ROM set. Download and decompress it into an assets folder next to (not inside!) the roms folder in any of the same places: next to the 86Box application (Windows executable, Linux AppImage or macOS app bundle) or in one of the system-wide locations for your host operating system.

On top of the asset pack change, the Mitsumi and Teac floppy drive recordings from v5.2 have been removed for technical reasons, so you may need to reconfigure floppy sounds after upgrading.

Windows 7 and 8 support

Windows 7 and 8 host systems are still supported for the time being, but on those Windows versions, the Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable must now be installed. You probably already have this installed by other applications or Windows updates, but in case you don’t and 86Box complains about a missing DLL, an installer can be downloaded from Microsoft’s website (get the x64 version).

Changelog

Emulator

User interface

Machines

Hardware