Free PC Emulators / IA-32 / x86 Emulators, Virtualization and Virtual Machines

QEMU on Windows QEMU on Windows is an emulator for x86, ARM, SPARC and PowerPC (see elsewhere on this page for more information). This site contains a Windows port with downloadable binaries. Q Q is a cocoa port of QEMU that allows you to run Windows, Linux, etc, on your Mac. You can exchange files between your host and guest operating systems. Q runs on OS/X and requires a G4/G5 processor. It can emulate a PC (x86 or x86_64 processor), a PowerPC (PPC), a G3, a Sun4m (32 bit Sparc processor), Sun4u (64 bit Sparc processor), Malta (32 bit MIPS processor) and a Mac99 PowerMac. It emulates a Soundblaster 16 card, a Cirrus CLGD 5446 PCI VGA card (or a dummy VGA card with Bochs VESA extensions), a PS/2 mouse and keyboard, 2 PCI IDE interfaces with hard disk and CD-ROM support, a floppy disk, NE2000 PCI network adapters and serial ports. Bochs IA-32 Emulation Project Bochs is an open source emulator for IA-32 (Intel x86) machines. It has the ability to emulate a 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, AMD64, with or without MMX, SSE, SSE2 and 3DNow, with common I/O devices (such as a SoundBlaster sound card, a NE2000 compatible network card, etc) and a custom BIOS. You can run Windows 95/NT, Linux and DOS as guest operating systems in that machine. Your guest OS will be installed in a large file which the emulator will use to mimic a hard disk for the emulated machine. Supported platforms (and here I mean platforms on which Bochs will run) include Win32 (Windows 9x/ME/2k/XP), Macintosh, Mac OS X, BeOS, Amiga MorphOS, OS/2, and Unix/X11 systems (including Linux). Xen Virtual Machine Monitor Xen is an open source virtual machine that allows you to run multiple guest operating systems partitioned in their own virtual machines. It currently runs on Linux (as the host operating system). Supported guest operating systems include Linux, Windows XP (work in progress), NetBSD and FreeBSD. Unlike some of the other virtual machines and emulators, however, Xen requires you to have a modified version of the operating system as the guest OS. QEMU CPU Emulator QEMU supports the emulation of x86 processors, ARM, SPARC and PowerPC. Host CPUs (processors that can run the QEMU emulator) include x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc32, ARM, S390, Sparc64, ia64, and m68k (some of these are still in development). When emulating a PC (x86), supported guest operating systems include MSDOS, FreeDOS, Windows 3.11, Windows 98SE, Windows 2000, Linux, SkyOS, ReactOS, NetBSD, Minix, etc. When emulating a PowerPC, currently tested guest OSes include Debian Linux. DOSEMU DOS Emulation on Linux DOSEMU is a well-known DOS emulator that runs in Linux (host OS). It can even run Windows 3.x in DOS emulation. DOSBox, an x86 Emulator with DOS DOSBox is an x86 emulator with a built-in DOS. It was created primarily to run DOS games. It emulates a 286/386 in real and protected modes, XMS/EMS, a graphics card (VGA/EGA/CGA/VESA/Hercules/Tandy), SoundBlaster/Gravis Ultra sound card, etc. You can apparently even run the old 16-bit Windows 3.1 in the emulator. Host operating systems (ie, platforms on which you can run the DOSBox emulator) include Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, BeOS, FreeBSD, MorphOS and Amiga68k. WINE WINE, which stands for WINE Is Not an Emulator, allows you to run Windows programs in Linux and other Unix-type systems. It is a layer that implements the Windows API in terms of X and Unix. You do not need to have Windows at all to run your Windows applications in WINE. Plex86 x86 Virtualization Project Plex86 is a virtual machine for running Linux on x86 machines. It only runs on a Linux running on an x86 machine. Minde Minde is an emulator that allows you to run some DOS applications, demos and games under Linux. PCEmu 8086 PC Emulator for X PCEmu emulates a basic 8086 PC with a VGA text-only display, allowing you to run some DOS programs. It runs under Linux. The program is no longer maintained.