86Box – Low level x86 emulator that runs older operating systems and software

Personality conflicts aside, both pieces of software are different enough from each other that it's basically comparing apples to haute cusine.

Myself, I've been using 86box since almost the beginning in large part because of the ui. To me, it's always been more pleasant to work with.

If anyone has questions I'd say rather than listing to 2017-era gossips they should instead download both, spend the time playing with them and seeing which they prefer. It's not like the mid-nineties where trying things required a $50-$150 investment of cash.

The way I’ve seen senior 86box project staff behave towards the developers of the project they forked away from really surprised me - a lot of emulator projects tend to be prone to silly rivalries, but this instance stuck me as unusually inappropriate behaviour - such were the levels of toxicity involved that at one point a senior staff member at 86box was bouncing around ideas mid-tirade speculating that a PCem contributor was in a sexual relationship with the project lead (put less delicately), this being drawn from the fact that they occasionally said good things about the project in public forums.

The software is what it is, and for anyone who considers it to simply be a means to an end, it’s a fine tool to use. I just personally found that incident (among other examples of extraordinarily toxic, childish behaviour from other contributors) to be sufficiently distasteful that I’d rather just not use the software at all.

This is are quite old sentiments on my part, and I expect things will probably have got a great deal better now, given how many years it’s been - it’s certainly not something that warrants calling for some kind of mob-facilitated cancellation of the project, which is, I must stress, a perfectly adequate PCem replacement under these circumstances.

Strictly just a case of me as an individual wishing that interactions had been less toxic prior to the parent project’s discontinuation. I won’t use it because of those memories, having known one of the people concerned at the time. I don’t really think it’s something that should affect anyone else’s decision to use the program at all - it’s very much an individual distaste for it on my part.

Of course. I didn't imply the various backends and operating mode of Qemu weren't part of the set.

I meant that Bochs and 86box are just single commands that do a single thing. Qemu is more like LLVM and is indeed massively more complex.

Interesting. This could interest a project like NetBSD for automated regression testing on old hardware.