86Box VS qemu-3dfx

86Box crashes on startup without showing any message, no matter the hardware or operating system being emulated and 86Box build, either stable, experimental or old/new dynamic recompiler. Created an issue on GitHub but the dev who replied said he couldn't reproduce it.

For emulation, you can look into PCem/86Box

Unsurprising, of the 300 staffing agencies in our area only 23 are actually licensed to legally operate as a service. Trying to authenticate which are "fake" or "real" is a thread most companies/applicants rather not pull.

There is also the fake-hire scam: where staff are lured away with a lucrative compensation packages, data-mined by the competitor, and finally jettisoned before the evaluation period expires (typically 6 to 10 months).

A few infected PDFs from various bad actors are also floating around out there with exaggerated promises.

Keep safe, and note 86box supports read-only backing images and sessions Like Bochs/kvm:

https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

(works on Apple M1 laptops, but is slow)

https://86box.net/#downloads | https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

Features are implemented much, much faster, especially if you use nightly builds. Always adding hardware. You can look at the changelog: https://github.com/86Box/86Box/releases

Shaders are a rather young feature in 86box and very incomplete (only single pass shaders supported for now). I am not surprised they crash. Please report the bug to https://github.com/86Box/86Box/issues

Another solution is to emulate a win95 old pc. It works great and the compatibility is very very high. Try out 86Box. There is a process to set it up and install Windows, but it is worth it for playing stubborn games.

You want 86Box, a full PC emulator as opposed to a virtual machine.

There is also https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx pass-through 3D acceleration for qemu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e34mSBxDm7s

I've been porting this to Nixos all week. Handles glide emulation pretty well

https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx

As for 3D acceleration, I've seen this repository (no idea if it works) https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx, and I've also seen that QEMU added the "ati-vga" device, which supports the Rage 128 Pro and Radeon RV100, but those seem to be a bit WIP.

And, here we also have the 3rd option which is less well-known than CrossOver and Parallel Desktop while targeting older Windows games with compatibility issues on modern Windows, QEMU featuring qemu-3dfx for Apple Silicon https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx

You can check out qemu-3dfx for Apple Silicon macOS. https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx/wiki/Apple-Silicon-macOS-Prerequisites

If you are a true gamer from the late 90' s though, you can and probably will run into an old game that doesn't work on modern windows. PCem is really the only good option IMO, but performance is very limited. Especially with glide and 3d acceleration, even the fastest CPUs aren't able to emulate much faster than a pentium II 200mhz at voodoo 2 at full speed (if you are emulating MMX on top of that forget it). Virtualization is possible but not likely to help as win95 virtualization is very basic and doesn't do much gaming things very well. With that said, there are some pretty crazy virtualization projects out there; here is one that requires you to compile everything from source yourself for basically no reason https://github.com/kjliew/qemu-3dfx (have fun).