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.

  • The regular variant (86Box) is recommended; it is compiled with the --preset=regular CMake flag, enabling the default feature set.

    • Release versions of 86Box are based on this variant.

  • The debug variant (86Box-Debug) is compiled with the --preset=debug CMake flag, which provides debug symbols and no optimizations, to allow for debugging with gdb and other tools.

    • This variant runs slower than the standard one due to the removal of optimizations and addition of debugging features.

Discontinued variants

  • 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.

    • Optimized binaries can still be produced by compiling 86Box from source with the --preset=optimized CMake flag, which enables optimizations for the build host’s CPU microarchitecture. No support will be provided for those.