BasicBox: A 486-class PC emulator written entirely in Visual Basic 6

Summary

BasicBox: an x86 PC emulator written in Visual Basic 6 BasicBox is an x86 PC emulator written entirely in Visual Basic 6. Emulated CPU support is at a 486 baseline, but includes a few later opcodes such as CMOV and RDTSC. It can run Windows NT 4.0, Linux and DOS. Slowly. You are going to want a very modern CPU with high IPC and high clock speed. My i9-13900KS runs things okay. My Ryzen 7 4800H laptop, much less so. Why would I write an x86 emulator in VB6? It seemed like a fun project. I grew up with VB6, and I still like to do stupid stuff like this in it sometimes. This is really a port of my other emulator, PCulator, which is written in C. It's fairly functional. Tested working OSes are Windows NT 4.0, various older Debian GNU/Linux distributions, and DOS. It can run many DOS games as well. Again, slowly. Games that needed a real 486 are not generally going to be very playable in BasicBox, if at all. This whole project is really more of a proof-of-concept, showing that it's at least possible to emulate a full PC in VB6. There are two sample hard disk images available in the release section along with the pre-built BasicBox release. There is a FreeDOS sample, and a Debian Potato 2.2 sample. Unzip them into the same folder where you put BasicBox.exe, navigate to that folder in a command prompt and type either run-FreeDOS.bat or run-potato.bat The root password for the Debian sample is "basicbox" BasicBox currently requires you to configure the guest machine from the command line. Launch with -h for a list of options. I plan to have a GUI configuration utility soon. Click in the window or press Ctrl-F11 to "grab" the mouse. Ctrl-F11 releases the grab. Ctrl-F12 injects a Ctrl-Alt-Delete sequence to the guest OS. Windows NT 4.0 doesn't like my IDE controller, it blue screens during startup unless using a SCSI hard disk. DOS and Linux seem to work fine with IDE. There is a "-video et4000" option but it's buggy and has issues, so I don't recommend using it yet. Stick wi...