News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini.

Re:Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with... by TimTheTinker on Friday September 25, 2026 @10:46AM (#49845422)
Why is this better than running Windows 98 on a guest VM (non-emulated) on modern x86 hardware?

Surely a modern hypervisor should be able to emulate a retro Voodoo 3D card.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with... by boomlinde on Friday September 25, 2026 @12:20PM (#49846583)
Second sentence in the article:

> CPU timing, chipset behaviour, ISA and PCI buses, graphics chipsets, sound devices, and disk controllers all matter to getting period software to behave properly.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with... by newtonianrules on Friday September 25, 2026 @10:49AM (#49845468)
Because that requires x86 hardware which some people no longer have.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with... by trollbridge on Friday September 25, 2026 @01:37PM (#49847633)
No modern hypervisors emulate a Voodoo 3D card. The upcoming 86Box release will probably have Riva 128 and ATI Rage 128 emulation as well.

Using an accurate emulation of such a device means you can use the drivers that existed back then that games back then were QA'd on.

Most modern hypervisors aren't built with Windows 98 in mind, either - it's not really what they're for, and a modern Mac can't run an x86 hypervisor anyway.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with... by compiler-guy on Saturday September 26, 2026 @03:36PM (#49859805)
It's a highly specialized use-case where every little detail of the timing and hardware is important. So that, for example, games run exactly right.

For folks without this particular use case, other emulation solutions are probably better.

[ Parent | on HN ]