THTheFreim·Sep 13, 2023Submission
1 points · Open discussionptitSeb
box86
C2019–2023
ptitSeb / box86
box86
Box86 - Linux Userspace x86 Emulator with a twist, targeted at ARM Linux devices
18Distinct people
21Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
3.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Box86 - Linux Userspace x86 Emulator with a twist, targeted at ARM Linux devices
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
It definitely isn't. I've been a huge linux nerd since my preteens in the late 2000s, I jumped on to squeeze more performance out of the thoroughly mediocre hardware I had…
spijdar used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year21 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2019-09-14 22:20:45 UTC to 2023-09-13 20:27:29 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 1 | 8 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
21 sourcesQemu does something similar. And Box86 does that while keeping 3D acceleration on converting X86->ARM linux binaries.
https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
In Xbox360 –> Windows Executable Converter (2017)New Release of Box86/Box64, with Better Compatibility of x86 x86_64 Games on ARM
2 points · Open discussionYou can already do x86 emulation on linux ARM devices via other means[0] including on the Raspberry Pi. Keep in mind performance will be greatly degraded, but its possible.
[0]https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
In Quick Look at Rosetta on LinuxIt definitely isn't. I've been a huge linux nerd since my preteens in the late 2000s, I jumped on to squeeze more performance out of the thoroughly mediocre hardware I had access to. I wanted to program, and I found Visual Studio to be incomprehensibly dense and confusing, while Linux tools were so much simpler, with GCC, GEdit, makefiles and the like being more to my liking. I fell deep into the rabbit hole, learned emacs, then vim (it was more responsive on my intel atom-powered netbook), became a "shell guru", eventually went to college at 16 and started doing cybersecurity work/pentesting professionally. I've even made a tiny contribution to the Linux kernel, which I'm pretty proud of.
All this anecdata to say, I consider myself pretty okay at using Linux, I "prefer" Linux, but I don't use Linux for gaming. Not unless it makes sense.
Read the rest
I play Minecraft on Linux, and FOSS games that were developed on Linux. There's a POWER9 desktop on my desk that runs Linux, and all my professional and hobby work goes there. I love it.
But any commercial games? They go on my old college-days Intel desktop, running Win10. I can do the work to get games running on Linux, but why bother? Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger and strace and crap to do more $DAYJOB work.
Not to say I never do that for fun. I do. I've done some work with https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86, and that involves a similar process. But I just frankly don't find doing it to your average Steam game to be very fun. Sometimes the muse strikes, usually it doesn't.
And for your average Linux user, much less your average computer user overall, you can forget about it. IMO, unless you have a strong ideological reason to only use FOSS OSes (and all the power to you!), the reason you use Linux is because it's a vastly superior tool for certain problems.
Playing your average commercial game is not one of them.
> But probably not AAA gaming, since gaming on Linux is a tough proposition even in the best of circumstances.
Just in case that's unknown to you or to other readers: It's really not true. Have a look at https://www.protondb.com/ - Linux is excellent for gaming, even AAA gaming. The PI processor just would be too weak either way, and not being x86 would prevent the games from running directly. Maybe that incompatibility and not having proprietary games compiled for ARM available is what you meant? That would need something like https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86, which actually seems to work way better than expected.
In Tried Nvidia’s GTX 1080 – still no external GPU on a PiHuh? You totally can -- it's even mentioned down in the README in the github repo: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86#notes-about-steam
You can download a straight tar.gz file from Steam [0], extract it, and run the contained steam executable with box86, and as long as you have the ARM versions of some native libraries installed as mentioned in the project readme, x86 Linux steam will run fine, no wine required.
Fun fact, box86 also works on PowerPC, I got it running at the start of the year. Not sure how much has bitrotted, but if you've got a POWER8/9/10 machine, it can run box86 ;)
(without JIT, so dramatically slower than in the article, but better than qemu usermode!)
[0] http://repo.steampowered.com/steam/pool/steam/s/steam/
In Box86 vs native: OpenGL is almost native, CPU bound 50%, SSE3 is slowerIt's right in the README - "Box86's Dynarec uses a mechanism with Memory Protection and a SegFault signal handler to handle JIT code." Essentially, code areas are write protected and when they trigger a write fault, the area is marked as "dirty" to be recompiled.
https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86/commit/2aa2e53fef61d00df535...
first "protect memory, fault handler purges that code block as 'invalid' approach"
and
https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86/commit/4778760622df90c97da2...
second, "mark block as dirty rather than purging it" approach
In Box86 vs native: OpenGL is almost native, CPU bound 50%, SSE3 is slowerCould box86 help here? https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
In GTA III and Vice City fully reverse engineered: re3I came across box86 yesterday during FOSDEM. It have not yet tried it, but is similar and actively maintained: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
In Faux86: A portable, open-source 8086 emulator for bare metal Raspberry Pi (2019)> if you wanted performance you'd probably be better off starting from scratch with an emulator design that cared about performance and which was really clear about its use-cases
See box86:
https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
In The Evolution of the QEMU Translator> Wine doesn't work on ARM.
You'll be delighted to hear that that's not entirely true - there is a Linux x86-on-ARM emulator Box86 [1] that allows you to run Wine apps [2]. While your expectations should be realistic, it's made to defer as much as possible to platform native implementations so there's a bunch of things you can run!
[1]: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
[2]: e.g. here's Warcraft 3 on a Raspberry Pi 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85bfzDSWHNQ
In Odroid-Go Super: $80 Games Console That Looks Like a Switch, but Runs UbuntuAlso check out Box86: https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
Impressive to see people playing Half-Life 2, Unreal Tournament 99 and 2004 on a Raspberry Pi 4.
Curious if this could be extended to Emscripten (JIT for WebAssembly/Emscripten?) which would be perfect for archiving and portability. Closest project I have seen is DOSBox-X which seems to already have an Emscripten port: https://github.com/joncampbell123/dosbox-x
HL2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq5dJ0oc_6k
UT2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VOAeOQcrdo
In Huawei ExaGear: x86_64 apps on Arm 64-bit Linux systems> Docker w/ arm linux kernel + x86 userland images: I don't what existing projects might me candidates, but any translation solution would be found within the linux guestOS, not macOS.
That could be something doing dynarec like box86, which is mindboggingly the only way to run (x86) Zoom on a arm7hf Linux atop a Raspberry Pi 4 (I tried it on a Pi3B: it works but it’s way too slow)
https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
In Docker fails to launch on Apple SiliconShowing the 15 most recent of 21 sources. Enable JavaScript to search and browse every indexed mention.