New version of Box64 v0.2.6 and Box86 v0.3.4

After sometime debugging some last issues, the new version of box64 and box86 are out. Most of the work has been done on Box64, with lots of improvments again on Emulation and Library wrapping.

The CPU emulate up to SSE 4.2 now (it was only SSE 4.1 before), and it also handle the SHA extension. Most of the new supported opcodes have an ARM64 Dynarec conversion already (it’s not the case yet with RV64 for those new opcodes). Box86 also have SSE 4.2 support, but only on interpreter for now.

There have been also a huge work on the GTK3 wrapping side, especially around gstreamer for Box64. This allows wine/proton to use the native gstreamer library and all it’s plugin to playback windows medias.

Also improved has been the memory footprint of box64 (and box86). It is now possible to launch small games from Steam on 4GB machine (but a swap is still advised for steam). The picture of the post is Minimtro launched from Steam on a simple PI/400.

On the RiSC-V side, a lot of new opcode have been added to the Dynarec, with some focus on Wine/Wow64. Thos version of Wine allow 32bits application to run entirely on a 64bits system (so with box64 only). Things are progressing on that front and more apps are new running. There are still a few issues on some FPU opcode making most game unplayable yet, but it will become a reality soon.

In the video below you can see a few AAA and Indies games running on a ADLink Ampere Altra. This mahine have 128 ARM64 cores! And also 96GB or RAM (you need a lot of memory to feed all those cores). It is now equiped with an RTX 4060. After adding some Vulkan extension, Raytracing anabled titles just run. In the Video you can see for example Doom Eternal and The Witcher 3 with RTX|On.

Go check the releases box86 and box64.

Side note to conclude: in november, like every years, was the Capitole du Libre, a FOSS event in Toulouse (France). I was present on a modest Box86/Box64 booth, with some hardware to showcase what is possible to do on ARM and RiSC-V hardware. You can find a few more pictures on the Dragonbox Pyra forum there.