Abstract
Explains what Bochs is and a general idea of how it works. Links and briefly describes alternatives.
An emulator is a software program that provides a virtual hardware platform. Software instructions that would be run on hardware are now interpreted by the emulator software. This allows you to "run" a different kind of computer hardware and its software in a window on your computer. Although the performance of the software run on a virtual computer will be much slower than on real hardware, it provides several advantages:
Bochs (pronounced "box") is an emulator written for the PC. It can run on both DOS/Windows and Linux operating systems. It emulates an x86 hardware system and has emulation for the 386, 486 and Pentium CPUs. It also provides IO port and BIOS emulation. Bochs can run Linux, DOS, Windows 95, Windows NT 4, ReactOS and many other operating systems. The software was initially written by Kevin Lawton and is now maintained by the Bochs SourceForge project. Although this project provides the latest Bochs binaries, we recommend that you test ReactOS with the Bochs binaries provided by our reactos.com Bochs page.
There are other emulators which you may want to try out when testing ReactOS. Here are some worth mentioning: