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Emulator

How to install 86Box?

Legacy Installer

• 2 min read
86Box

86Box is a low level x86 emulator that runs older operating systems and software designed for IBM PC systems and compatibles from 1981 through fairly recent system designs based on the PCI bus.

Installing

Linux

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If you have not already installed a Linux distribution, see our tutorials on how to install Kubuntu, a beginner-friendly distro.

On most Linux distributions, you will want to install 86Box from Flathub. First, you need to enable Flatpak and Flathub support on your distribution. See this page to know how to do so. If you are following VirtualHub Setup tutorials from the beginning, we covered enabling Flatpak and Flathub support in Kubuntu in the post titled "What to do after installing Kubuntu?".

After you have enabled Flathub support, you can run the following command to install 86Box:

flatpak install flathub net._86box._86Box

It will install `net._86box._86Box.ROMs` as a dependency. That package contains the ROMs required to run 86Box.

To run 86Box, we need to run the following command:

flatpak run net._86box._86Box

Let's make it simpler to use. If you are using Bash (the default shell on most Linux distros) or are not sure which shell you are using, run:

nano ~/.bashrc

Add the following line to the end of the file:

alias 86Box="flatpak run net._86box._86Box"

nano ~/.bashrc

And then press Ctrl+Alt+O to save the file and Ctrl+Alt+X to exit nano.

Now close your terminal and open it again. Now you can simply run 86Box to start it.

If you don't like flathub for any reason, you can also download 86Box as an AppImage from its github releases page. On Arch Linux and related distros, you can install it from AUR too. While the AUR package installs another package with ROMs, you need to manually download the ROMs and place it in the proper place if you use the AppImage. Download the ROMs from here. You can learn where to place the ROMs from this page.

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There is a manager for 86Box which works on Linux, but it is incomplete and buggy, so we won't use it in our tutorials.

Windows

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You should use Linux. If you don't know how to install a Linux distro, see our tutorials on how to install Kubuntu, a beginner-friendly distro.

You can download a Windows executable from the github releases page of 86Box. You need to download and place the ROMs in the correct location. Download the ROMs from here. See this page to learn how to do so.

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There is a good, maintained Manger for 86Box on Windows. You can use it if you want.

Documentation

You can read the 86Box documentation here.

Credits

  • 86Box is an open source software made possible by its awesome developers. You can visit its github page to know more.

Video tutorial

Do you want to follow the tutorial by watching a video? We will post a video on our youtube channel soon.

Archives of this tutorial are available on Wayback Machine.

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