Many guest operating systems can be run using the emulator including DOS, several versions of Windows, BSDs, Linux, AmigaOS and MorphOS. Bochs can run on many host operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Mac OS X.
Bochs is mostly used for operating system development (when an emulated operating system crashes, it does not crash the host operating system, so the emulated OS can be debugged) and to run other guest operating systems inside already running host operating systems. Some people use it to run older software – such as computer games – which will not run on their non-compatible computers.
Bochs can emulate the hardware needed by the guest operating system, including hard drives, CD drives, and floppy drives. Disk and ISO images can be "inserted" while the system is being run. However, the system performance is very slow due to the fact that it is only emulated. It doesn't provide any CPU virtualization features. However, it is useful for capturing screen shots in researching old DOS software. Bochs is widely used for hobbyist OS developing, as it saves the need for constant system restarts (to test code) Bochs is preferred by OS developers because it has error reporting and dump files that other emulators lack.
I am using this software as it is light but little hard to use for those who don't really know how to "scripting", since this program run from DOS without special Windows interface.
Rating: 4.2/5
Tested system: PC-DOS 1.10, MS-DOS 2.xx until 6.22, Windows 1.01 until Windows 3.11 (but for Windows 1.01, 1.02, 1.03 appear in black-n-white, instead of colours).
Click on the picture to enlarge, screen captured on Windows 95 guest system.
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