86Box is an IBM PC system emulator that specializes in running old operating systems and software designed for IBM PC systems and compatibles from 1981 through fairly recent system designs based on the PCI bus.
86Box is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 only.
For more information, see the COPYING file.
The project maintainer is OBattler.
If you need a configuration manager for 86Box, use the 86Box Manager, our officially endorsed 86Box configuration manager, developed by Overdoze (daviunic).
We operate an IRC channel and a Discord server for discussing anything related to retro computing and, of course, 86Box. We look forward to hearing from you!
See our documentation for an overview of the emulator's features and user interface.
See the build guide.
For your convenience, we compile a number of 86Box builds per revision on our Jenkins instance.
| Regular | Debug | Optimized | Experimental |
|---|---|---|---|
- Regular builds are compiled using the settings in the building guide above. Use these if you don't know which build to use.
- Debug builds are same as regular builds but include debug symbols. If you don't need them, you don't need to use this build.
- Optimized builds have the same feature set as regular builds, but are optimized for every modern Intel and AMD processor architecture, which might improve the emulator's performance in certain scenarios.
- Experimental (Dev) builds are similar to regular builds but are compiled with certain unfinished features enabled. These builds are not optimized for maximum performance.
We do not charge you for the emulator but donations are still welcome: https://paypal.me/86Box.
You can now also support the project on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/86box.