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What is the difference between Wine and x86 hardware emulators?

April 26, 2017Emulators hardware Wine x86

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What is the difference between Wine and x86 hardware emulators?

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There are two free x86 hardware emulators: Bochs, and Plex86. Plex86 is the open-source free-software alternative for VMWare, VirtualPC, and other IA-32 on IA-32 “Virtual PC products.” It can only run on the IA-32 architecture. Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86 CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS. Currently, Bochs can be compiled to emulate a 386, 486 or Pentium CPU. Bochs is capable of running most Operating Systems inside the emulation including Linux, Windows® 95, DOS, and recently Windows® NT/2000. Both are licensed under the GPL. Bochs is older than Plex86, seems to be easier to install, but Plex86 will run faster because Plex86 uses a just in time binary compiler. The drawback of all emulators is that you need a version of Windows in order to run Windows, and that they all have an impact on performance. Wine also gives much better desktop integration – f