Advanced builds

The experimental builds page, backed by the 86Box Jenkins, provides pre-release testing builds for advanced users. These are linked to the 86Box git repository on GitHub; a new build is produced from the latest source code every time the repository is updated.

Important

Testing builds are development snapshots which may contain bugs, unfinished features, reduced performance or other issues. These should only be used if you know what you’re doing.

Variants

86Box builds are available in a number of variants. The experimental builds page will automatically detect the recommended variant for the system you’re viewing it on, but if you’re downloading builds for a different system or directly through Jenkins, use the guide below to select a variant:

  • The Old Recompiler is recommended. The New Recompiler is in beta; you may experience bugs and performance loss with it.

    • The Old Recompiler is not available for the ARM architecture. You must select the New Recompiler for running 86Box on ARM Linux systems.

  • On Windows, select x64 or ARM according to your system’s architecture.

  • On Linux, select x64 or ARM according to your system’s architecture.

  • On macOS, Universal supports both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

    • The New Recompiler is always used on Apple Silicon due to its ARM architecture, even if the Old Recompiler is selected.

Discontinued variants

The following variants are no longer built by Jenkins and can only be compiled from source where applicable:

  • 32-bit architectures (x86 and ARM32) as of September 3rd 2024.

    • These were eliminated to better focus development on relevant 64-bit architectures, since systems old enough to be 32-bit-only lack the performance for a satisfactory emulation experience.

    • The dynamic recompiler and other components no longer support 32-bit architectures as of September 13th 2025.

  • Debug variants (86Box-Debug) as of April 2nd 2023.

    • These were compiled with debug symbols and reduced optimizations to help with running the emulator under gdb or other debuggers. They were eliminated as the setup process for debugging grew closer to just compiling from source instead.

  • Dev variants (86Box-Dev and 86Box-DevODR) as of November 18th 2021.

    • These contained incomplete and experimental features subject to change at any time, with the -Dev variant also containing the New Recompiler beta.

  • Optimized variants (86Box-Optimized) as of March 18th 2021.

    • These had aggressive microarchitecture-specific optimizations which provided very little performance improvement (within margin of error on modern CPUs) while introducing bugs and other incorrect behavior.