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It's truly awesome and has nearly become synonymous with emulation on Linux.

Of course without things like KVM, and assorted accelerators, etc. it would lose a fair bit of luster. We all stand on the shoulders of giants to some degree.

Nonetheless, I don't know of another free emulator that even comes close... are there any to speak of?

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QEMU is still amazing even without KVM; KVM is just a performance improvement for native platforms.

But with QEMU you can emulate extremely exotic CPUs on standard x86's; that's the stuff that Console Emulators struggled with immensely!

Not to trivialize QEMU (I use it often and I love it) but usually the challenge with console emulators are A) emulating supporting hardware such as graphics chips which are often undocumented and B) achieving cycle accurate emulation for platforms which need that. QEMU emulates relatively standard hardware for each platform. Even for x86, sometimes I find 86box or PCem more desirable for certain older hardware/software vs QEMU.

Well, it depends, the i440FX chipset with an SB16 will run most if not all DOS games.

... and, since you need the OS, there's always FreeDOS.

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