Brings back memories; so much nostalgia. I still remember clearly the first real graphics card (I think it was voodoo) I got and when I fired up TFC (which I'd played sans graphics card up to then), just staring at the water for a bit and being amazed by it. The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones; I remember being a little confused at first that everything looked worse. But of course it enabled all kinds of new and more immersive experiences. It was funny to experience... how it felt. To look both crappy and amazing at the same time; to be its own "thing" really.

I also enjoyed introducing people to it, and watching them look at it the first time. You could tell who would get hooked. Some people would play the game a minute or two and be like wow yeah this is pretty neat, and then go about their life. Others would kind of just stop and almost watch themselves, and almost invariably just start laughing. It was so pleasing to watch it melt people's minds the way it had mine.

Anyways, a special time. Really fun seeing these projects.

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...

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

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.

Emulated llama whipping, what an era we live in

Going from software rendering to hardware acceleration back then was good times.

Quake II & IIIa

Tribes & Tribes II

Half-Life, TFC, Counter-Strike

Morrowind

Unreal

Those moments will never return...

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.

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

How's the idle temperature though? In my experience, emulating these, while they may perform well, runs Macs incredibly hot, like, uncomfortably hot to the point of being reported as nearly triple digits according to MacThrottle.

Total blast from the past. I remember I bought my Voodoo 1. It was the Diamond 3DFX card. I bought it in 1995 and it was amazing. GL was so optimized. For gl quake. Back then Windows, Direct 3D was just slow. But then later Nvidia started to come out with more capable gpus such as TNT and they eventually took over the gaming market.

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!.

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.

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?

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.

Why is this better than running Windows 98 on a guest VM (non-emulated) on modern x86 hardware?

Surely a modern hypervisor should be able to emulate a retro Voodoo 3D card.

I have not followed up x86 emulation recently, but is it a new project? or a port of bochs for Mac?

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

This is what computers are for.

Oh my got, the floppy disk drive sound, is so accurate, I am in full nostalgia mode. Off on to ebay to buy a real PS2! haha. The pain, the pain of ISA Cards etc. ALthough no physical cuts!

PII at 600mhz would’ve been an impressive overclock back in the day

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

Is this written by an LLM? It reads like it.

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

I vividly remember the agony of not having an AGP port on my motherboard and being forced to buy Voodoo 3-2000 (PCI). It was not as good as the Voodoo 3-3000, which was AGP, but finally I was able to play Quake2 with 3d acceleration. Good memories.

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

Computers got better, true

But those were much cooler than the ones today

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

But can it run Crysis? :-D

Cool now do it reverse. How does an M6 perform on a pentium II?

Quake party!!!!