Advanced builds

The 86Box Jenkins provides all kinds of pre-release testing builds for advanced users. These are linked to the 86Box git repository on GitHub; a new build is produced with the latest source code every time the repository is updated.

Important

Testing builds are development snapshots which may contain bugs, unfinished features 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 Jenkins 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 you have disabled JavaScript), 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 such as the Raspberry Pi.

  • On Windows, x86 (32-bit) is recommended even if you have a 64-bit system.

    • x64 (64-bit) allows for emulating more than 2 GB of RAM on some later machines and using larger soundfonts with FluidSynth, at a slight performance loss.

  • On Linux, select the correct architecture for your system, as most distributions lack x64-to-x86 and ARM64-to-ARM32 backwards compatibility by default.

  • 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

These variants are no longer built by Jenkins and can only be compiled from source.

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

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