PCem

PCem

86Box began as a fork of PCem, another open-source IBM PC emulator. PCem was originally developed by Sarah Walker from 2007 until her retirement from the project in 2021, at which point she named Michael Manley as the new project maintainer. Like 86Box, PCem allows users to emulate PC compatibles across a range of x86 processors—from the Intel 8088 to the Pentium II—as well as the ability to emulate sound cards (such as the Sound Blaster 16) and GPUs (including an extremely small number of early 3D accelerators: the S3 ViRGE/325, the S3 ViRGE/DX, the 3DFX Voodoo, and the 3DFX Voodoo2, but no ATI, Nvidia, Matrox, PowerVR, or Rendition chipsets). This versatility allows older PC software with complex hardware requirements to run accurately, in terms of clock speed and multimedia performance, on modern hardware. A benefit of 86Box over mainstream hosted hypervisors such as VirtualBox is the ability to run custom BIOS ROMs. This allows users to closely emulate specific PC compatibles, such as those by Compaq and Asus, among others.