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

150 points hugh4life 6 hours ago 60 comments

walrus01 5 hours ago | parent

Emulated llama whipping, what an era we live in

kar1181 5 hours ago | parent

86box is really fun, and the m4+ macs are great at running it. I've been working on a custom OS designed specifically for the pentium 2 core/isa (trying to write an high performance *nix for 1997-1999 for quake 1/2). 86box runs very faithfully to the real silicon p2s (and voodoo 3) I have without the nuisance of having to copy code over to it in development.

netsharc 5 hours ago | parent

Ah, those specs will run Need for Speed II smoothly!

septune 2 hours ago | parent

NSX !

qubex 5 hours ago | parent

Now I want to emulate my dual PIII-450 with an ATI Rage Fury 128 running Windows 2000.

sdcfgy 5 hours ago | parent

Heh I had one of those back in the day with an Intel made L440GX+ and SCSI disks. One of my favourite machines.

qubex 3 hours ago | parent

Dual processor machines back then were rather exotic. I was coming from a period on BeOS (“one processor per person is not enough!”) and I’ve never really been able to endure non-SMP machines since 1995. It’s common now of course. I had 512 MB of RAM and a pair of 9.4 (?) SCSI disks connected in RAID-0: I liked to live dangerously back in the day. It ended in tears a few times but I also had a 2GB Iomega Jaz drive for backups… yeah… eventually I switched to DVD-R… yeah… there’s holes in my records.

sdcfgy 3 hours ago | parent

Very cool! Never tried BeOS back in the day. I heard good things though.

Amazing times. I actually upgraded to that from a Compaq Professional Workstation 5000 which had dual Pentium Pro 180s in it. Ran NT and occasionally FreeBSD. Cost me a small fortune at the time. Backups here were to a SCSI DLT (can't remember capacity) that was chucked in the trash at work. All it needed was a minor repair.

sneak 3 hours ago | parent

I miss Windows 2000. Win32 was such a good time in desktop computing.

qubex 59 minutes ago | parent

Windows 2000 was some kind of brief apex. I was a beta tester and I saw it mature from ‘NT5’ into what it eventually became. It was too rapidly supplanted by Windows XP. It deserves to be remembered.

ChickeNES 2 hours ago | parent

Which motherboard did you have those in? I had a dual socket 370 EPoX board, but I never put a second CPU in it.

Also, sounds like I should work on upstreaming my Rage Fury 128 emulation...and the EPoX SMP emulation...(the perils of too much ADHD and too few tokens)

qubex 54 minutes ago | parent

I don’t really remember what motherboard I had. It definitely didn’t have dual sockets because the first PIII (Katmai) were Slot A devices. I even ran the utility to turn off the controversial unique serial number. I remember having all sorts of trouble after I replaced a processor because it turned out they had different steppings. I complained and made a pain of myself and eventually they replaced the existing unit with an equal stepping. Again, I can’t remember all the details.

ranger_danger 5 hours ago | parent

I would be interested to see a performance comparison with qemu and softgpu (https://github.com/JHRobotics/softgpu).

AshamedCaptain 3 hours ago | parent

Or a Rosetta-based emulator (like Parallels). But 86Box is going to be very bad there.

While they claim "accuracy" as one of the goals for 86Box, I believe accuracy is overrated in PC emus (you don't really need that much accuracy due to the variety of PC clones, and emus are not that accurate anyway). For me the biggest point for using 86Box over other PC emulators/virtualizers is the large selection of virtual hardware available to emulate, not performance.

kmeaw 2 hours ago | parent

86Box is just accurate enough to run the original unmodified firmware. It does not emulate cache and RAM behavior, so you won't get performance-related accuracy. You are likely to succeed in Spectre-like attacks against an emulated 386, which shouldn't be possible on a real thing.

If you don't care and just want to go faster on a modern x86 CPU, you can replace the CPU emulation part of 86Box with a hypervisor. I tried running a Socket 7 motherboard firmware on Linux's KVM - given the chipset emulation is correct, it works: it amusingly identifies an AMD Zen5 running at 3GHz as "Unknown-S CPU at M60MHz" and boots to a DOS prompt.

AshamedCaptain 1 hour ago | parent

Kind of proving why accuracy is not really that important for the PC world. Most era firmware would have tried to run on as much variety of machines possible.

KellyCriterion 5 hours ago | parent

But can it run Crysis? :-D

pjmlp 4 hours ago | parent

Hardly, given that the hardware predates the game.

normie3000 4 hours ago | parent

I think most games are written to run on hardware that predates them.

pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent

Kind of, while chronological true, that misses the hardware configuration that the games expect to be available as means to execute their binary code.

anthk 13 minutes ago | parent

A dual CPU board with a late 1GHZ Pentium III and a good video card might run it at lowest settings.

LetMeLogin 4 hours ago | parent

It can run Doom for sure.

farseer 4 hours ago | parent

Emulated Voodoo 3? Does that mean I can run games using Glide?

petaleverbloom 3 hours ago | parent

Yes, you can.

mglvsky 3 hours ago | parent

I'd play Messiah[1] - such a hidden gem

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messiah_(video_game)

szatkus 2 hours ago | parent

Available on Gog. Works fine on modern hardware last time I tried.

jwrallie 4 hours ago | parent

Wait, if single core performance matters, could it be that the MacBook Neo could be a good machine for 86Box? I assume thermal throttling could be a limitation but in theory it should be as fast as an M3 for single core performance.

petaleverbloom 4 hours ago | parent

Author of the article/site here, I have a MacBook neo I could test 86box on with this same build. But practically speaking yes, it has reasonable ST perf and my guess would be it's competitive with the best x86 chips available today for this workload.

hncbw02z5a 4 hours ago | parent

Glide works, yeah, but check your 86Box dynarec setting first. I had Unreal crawling on an M2 until I realized I was still on the interpreter core.

initramfs 4 hours ago | parent

I thought 86Box only emulated binaries, so I was a little confused on how it designates CPU speed and architecture. Good to know though...

AshamedCaptain 3 hours ago | parent

That's Box86 [not a joke].

initramfs 2 hours ago | parent

Thanks, you saved me a lot of time.

tomaskafka 4 hours ago | parent

I love it! The great 2026 benchmark is a native Turok (I vividly remember that 30fps low poly iguana looking as real as Jurassic Park in my childhood), Unreal and Q3A.

brnt 4 hours ago | parent

I had that with GTA3: seemed photorealistic at the time.

dcl 2 hours ago | parent

A bunch of PS2 cards had this effect on me. Fifa 2001, Gran Turismo 3, etc.

vegnus 2 hours ago | parent

Gran Turismo 3 still looks photo realistic!

sublinear 1 hour ago | parent

This is especially true on a CRT. People often forget how "good enough" the PS2 graphics were, and how big of a deal that was.

Even the prior two games had an extremely tasteful use of textures and geometry that just felt right and realistic enough to not break immersion despite the hardware limitations. This era of gaming rightfully and correctly recognized that any form of "realism" is ultimately an impression rather than an objective truth.

artisinal 4 hours ago | parent

I vaguely remember running a PlayStation emulator (bleem?) on my Pentium III 1Ghz processor.

Once the Mac mini M8 is released, will we be able to emulate a Pentium III which runs PlayStation emulation?

petaleverbloom 3 hours ago | parent

It ran VisualBoyAdvance pretty well! I haven't tried Project64 but I think the emulated Voodoo3 should support Jabos D3D6/7 backend with older versions. Was quite thrilled today to see my article blow up so if there's anything you'd want me to test I have mostly a free weekend.

bbarn 3 hours ago | parent

But can it emulate having two voodoo II's and a desk fan pointed at it?

birdsongs 1 hour ago | parent

TIL you could SLI Vodoo 2's, and 3dfx invented it. Very cool. (It's different from the nvidia SLI, same acronym, different tech.)

raverbashing 3 hours ago | parent

Computers got better, true

But those were much cooler than the ones today

mrngld 2 hours ago | parent

Corrected title: My Childhood Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini

acidburnNSA 2 hours ago | parent

I've been maintaining an emulated Pentium Pro 200 MHz Windows 95 machine on 86Box for some time with all my favorite old software from childhood. It's great for nostalgia, and if friends come over they have fun showing their kids things like SkiFree, Jezzball, and Encarta 96. Still holds up great for kids.

mysterydip 1 hour ago | parent

I think part of the reason it holds up still is things had to be designed for newcomers at the time, since people largely were.

mrngld 1 hour ago | parent

Yep, I showed my little ones Odell Down Under in the browser at one point, they loved it. A certain amount of that old software I copied to .iso from my physical CD's, but not sure where I could grab something like Encarta 96. Legally.

Had also been thinking about asking Codex to boil the oceans in an attempt to fully decompile or reverse engineer that OG of 1990s 4X games, 'Stars!'*, which I have a copy of, so I could have something modern and native for MacOS that kept all the mechanics. Maybe I should just do this instead, will have to investigate.

ssl-3 50 minutes ago | parent

IANAL and I have no idea where in the world you are, but downloading (as in with an http client) an ISO[1] is often treated rather dramatically very differently than distributing an ISO (as in a p2p torrent).

Alternatively: eBay. Encarta 96 CD-ROMs are available for about $20 in the US, delivered.

[1]: https://archive.org/details/ENCAR96ENCY

mikepurvis 9 minutes ago | parent

Cinemania 97 was a big part of this era for me too, though it was far less widespread than Encarta. Fantastic resource for classic film, and into the 80s and 90s, though it was bit quirky watching it get further and further out of date, like the big 1999 films that defined my youth (The Matrix, American Beauty, Fight Club, etc) all completely unknown to it of course.

bknight1983 43 minutes ago | parent

You had me at Winamp

jonstewart 2 hours ago | parent

Quake party!!!!

bbayer 1 hour ago | parent

It gives me chills when I see the 3dMark 2000 benchmark visuals. I thought it is pure magic when I first saw it. What was a time to be alive!.

MPSimmons 48 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, I still remember the first time I ran glxgears on accelerated hardware and I could not believe my eyes

cbm-vic-20 1 hour ago | parent

I had a fair amount of shares of TDFX back in the day, rode it all the way to their bankruptcy. NVDA bought the scraps and left retail shareholders like me with nothing. In a different reality, if 3dfx could have survived to the AI-era...

jonplackett 42 minutes ago | parent

I wanted a 3DFX card so bad when I was 10yo.

And then I wanted a GeForce so bad. But I only got £10 a week from my paper round.

If I’d invested just one week of my paper round in Nvidia shares though, it would be worth over £10 million today.

supermatt 19 minutes ago | parent

More like 2 years of your £10 a week paper round for that £10m return.

HPsquared 8 minutes ago | parent

And also never sold any of it between then and now.

igleria 39 minutes ago | parent

I remember watching those promos of need for speed 2 SE running on a 3DFX and feeling like a peasant for not having one.

afavour 13 minutes ago | parent

I still remember playing Quake 2 to death in software then finally getting a 3dfx card (I want to say it was a Banshee?), loading up the game and my mind being blown by how much more immersive it was.

Great times, the 3dfx name will always raise a smile for me.