If you’ve messed with VMs like VMware or VirtualBox and thought “this is cool, but it doesn’t feel like the real thing,” you should really check out 86Box.
86Box isn’t just spinning up a generic virtual PC - it’s emulating actual hardware. Like, specific motherboards, chipsets, video cards, sound cards… the whole stack. You’re not installing DOS or Windows on some abstract modern system - you’re basically building a late-80s / 90s machine piece by piece, just in software.
That means all the weird, picky, sometimes frustrating stuff actually works the way it used to. Timing quirks, compatibility issues, that one game that only behaves on a certain Sound Blaster model - it’s all there. In something like DOSBox, a lot of that is smoothed over (which is great for convenience), but 86Box leans hard into accuracy.
It’s slower, yeah. It takes more setup. But if you’re into vintage computing, it hits totally different. It’s less “run old software” and more “recreate the machine you had (or wanted) back in the day.”
Curious if anyone here has gone deep with it - what configs are you running?