Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini(nyaa.sh)
282 points by hugh4life 19 days ago | 121 comments
tl;dr: The M6 Mac Mini sustains a 600MHz emulated Pentium II with Voodoo 3 in 86Box (Windows 98, Cinebench + Winamp running) at a flat 100% emulation speed, a 20% improvement over the base M4's 500MHz ceiling. Since 86Box's cycle-accurate emulation is bottlenecked on a single thread, Apple Silicon's strong single-core performance (~4.7GHz on the M6's "super" cores) makes the Mini punch well above its weight. Oddly, emulated Cinebench 2000 scores run 60%+ higher than user-reported results from real period hardware at the same clocks, likely due to cache/memory timing inaccuracies in P6 emulation.
HN Discussion:
  • ↑Nostalgia for late-90s PC gaming and early 3D graphics era
  • ↑Praise for 86Box's faithful emulation and suitability on Apple Silicon Macs
  • •Reflection on 3dfx/Voodoo's business demise and what-ifs
  • •Questioning technical claims like the meaning of cycle-accurate emulation
  • ↑Speculation about other Apple Silicon machines being suitable for 86Box given single-core focus