Originally started by Kevin Lawton, the bochs project – whose motto is “Think inside the bochs” – maintains the bochs emulator. Bochs aims to emulate – at a reasonable speed and with a fair degree of accuracy – an x86-based 32-bit PC with the AMD 64-bit extensions. It can run most operating systems inside it (as “guest operating systems”, if you prefer the VMWare term), such as Windows (3.1, 95, Vista…), Linux, Minix or one of the BSDs. (They even collect disk images as well). In addition, Bochs also runs on loads of operating systems as well – Windows, BeOS, OSX, Irix, Solaris…

While the interface of bochs isn’t for the faint-hearted (configuration is through text files, and networking can be very tricky to set up on a Windows host), bochs 2.3.7 posts some significant speed improvements over earlier versions. It can emulate up to 8 processors but – and here’s something you may want to think about – it doesn’t make use of additional processors on the host machine. So if you just need to run programs, emulate a single CPU. If you need to debug applications in a multiprocessor environment, however, without buying expensive hardware, then bochs is a good choice.

While trickier to use than, say, VMWare or Virtual PC, bochs has the advantage of being truly portable – it will run anywhere, on anything. Useful if you need some Windows 95 applications that don’t run on Vista. Or to run those old Windows 3.1 or DOS games.

It’s also great for a first take on Linux. If you’ve never used Linux, or a Unix shell before, bochs comes with a 10MB disk image of DLX Linux. Not many applications on there you can work with, but enough to get a general feel of the how Linux based operating systems work without downloading a 700MB boot disk.

So, enough waffle. What can you do with it?

Well, on my 2GHz Athlon-based system, a bochs virtual machine is now powerful enough to run Windows 98 and the original Dungeon Keeper, which has terrible problems even running on XP. Now if you’ll excuse me, some other keeper has had the temerity to set up a dungeon in the corner of a land I’ve got my eye on. I ought to string him up – it’s the only language he understands…

Tags: Dungeon Keeper, Emulation and Virtualisation, LGPL, Linux, PC, windows

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 20:48 and is filed under Emulation and Virtualisation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.