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I'm not sure why this was ever dropped, if I remember right back in the early 2010s, this ran XP very usable on a C2D XP laptop. Pretty sure I even got 7 working at some point, the only real limit was that it absolutely could not run 64 bit vms.

It's because dynamic recompilation as done in VirtualBox & QEmu is on the order of 10x slower than CPU accelerated/supported virtualization. You don't notice that (as much) with DOS or a simple Windows 9x VM. But you will notice that if you're running busy SQLServer, ISS, .Net, Linux, PostgreSQL, MySQL Servers.

I pulled out my version of 86Box to check, and it does have mandatory dynamic recompilation if you try to emulate later chips.