Mac Mini M6 Emulates a 600MHz Pentium II with Voodoo 3 Graphics
Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
86Box emulates old PCs at the hardware level, and its accuracy demands a single fast CPU core. Testing a custom build with extended frequency tables, the M6 Mac Mini sustained a 600MHz Pentium II with Voodoo 3 graphics at a flat 100% emulation speed, 20% higher than the M4's 500MHz ceiling. Cinebench 2000 scores show the emulated system rivaling a Pentium III 800MHz.
It is the clearest case I have found so far where the M6's single-core lead translates into something you can actually feel rather than something you read off a chart.
- cloverich
Brings back memories; so much nostalgia. I still remember clearly the first real graphics card (I think it was voodoo) I got and when I fired up TFC (which I'd played sans graphics card up to then), just staring at the water for a bit and being amazed by it. The funny thing too is when 3d graphics were first taking over, the games themselves didn't look as nice as the former 2d ones; I remember being a little confused at first that everything looked worse. But of course it enabled all kinds of new and more immersive experiences. It was funny to experience... how it felt. To look both crappy and amazing at the same time; to be its own "thing" really.
I also enjoyed introducing people to it, and watching them look at it the first time. You could tell who would get hooked. Some people would play the game a minute or two and be like wow yeah this is pretty neat, and then go about their life. Others would kind of just stop and almost watch themselves, and almost invariably just start laughing. It was so pleasing to watch it melt people's minds the way it had mine.
Anyways, a special time. Really fun seeing these projects.
- VCFundedGenYer
How's the idle temperature though? In my experience, emulating these, while they may perform well, runs Macs incredibly hot, like, uncomfortably hot to the point of being reported as nearly triple digits according to MacThrottle.
- cbm-vic-20
I had a fair amount of shares of TDFX back in the day, rode it all the way to their bankruptcy. NVDA bought the scraps and left retail shareholders like me with nothing. In a different reality, if 3dfx could have survived to the AI-era...
- mrngld
Corrected title: My Childhood Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
- kar1181
86box is really fun, and the m4+ macs are great at running it. I've been working on a custom OS designed specifically for the pentium 2 core/isa (trying to write an high performance *nix for 1997-1999 for quake 1/2). 86box runs very faithfully to the real silicon p2s (and voodoo 3) I have without the nuisance of having to copy code over to it in development.
- 9x39
Going from software rendering to hardware acceleration back then was good times.
Quake II & IIIa
Tribes & Tribes II
Half-Life, TFC, Counter-Strike
Morrowind
Unreal
Those moments will never return...
- walrus01
Emulated llama whipping, what an era we live in
- tomaskafka
I love it! The great 2026 benchmark is a native Turok (I vividly remember that 30fps low poly iguana looking as real as Jurassic Park in my childhood), Unreal and Q3A.