Welcome to the Bochs IA-32 Emulator Project
    Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86 CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS. Currently, bochs can be compiled to emulate a 386, 486 or Pentium CPU. Bochs is capable of running most Operating Systems inside the emulation including Linux, Windows® 95, DOS, and recently Windows® NT 4. Bochs was written by Kevin Lawton and is currently maintained by this project.
    Bochs can be compiled and used in a variety of modes, some which are still in development. The 'typical' use of bochs is to provide complete x86 PC emulation, including the x86 processor, hardware devices, and memory. This allows you to run OS's and software within the emulator on your workstation, much like you have a machine inside of a machine. For instance, let's say your workstation is a Unix/X11 workstation, but you want to run Win'95 applications. Bochs will allow you to run Win 95 and associated software on your Unix/X11 workstation, displaying a window on your workstation, simulating a monitor on a PC.


Bochs 1.4 Released
March 27, 2002: Bochs 1.4 is the latest release of Bochs. This version delivers features that many people have been wishing for: booting from a CDROM, VESA BIOS Extensions, improved networking, keyboard mapping for non-US keyboards, and a working serial port. You'll notice several new buttons on the GUI, copy, paste, and snapshot, which let you copy text between the system clipboard and the Bochs screen. And we have a new cross-platform interface using a library called SDL (Simple DirectMedia Layer). Give it a spin! (Details - Download Now).


Previous release: Bochs 1.3
December 12, 2001: Bochs 1.3 is a feature release of Bochs, with many great improvements over Bochs 1.2. Enhancements include a new configuration system, networking support in Linux and Windows NT/2000, native MacOS X support, and the ability to use ISO image files (Press Release - Details - ">Download Now ).


Bochs IRC Chat Transcripts
The Bochs community held an IRC open discussion chat on Sunday, April 7, 2002. We talked about the recent 1.4 release, did some planning for the future, and even fixed some bugs during the meeting. (Transcript). Here are some transcripts of earlier conversations: June 19, 2001, May 30, 2001.


Help Wanted
We currently need help with the following tasks:

• PC Hardware Gurus: Mouse, interrupt controller, timer, IDE controller, network card, keyboard, VGA... Most of our bug reports and feature requests are due to incomplete C++ models of the various PC devices. To improve this, we need PC Hardware Gurus who know where to find the specs for this stuff and improve the hardware models for Bochs. Working on models is a fun way to learn how things work, and unlike designing a real hard disk, you can test out your changes on a real operating system immediately!
• Documentation: Adding installation help and other useful information into the docs.
• Testing: We need help keeping the Testing Status page up to date. This involves reading the testing forms as they arrive and writing a short database entry so that the Testing Status page knows where to add the link. It's not a hard job! Or, if you like web programming, you might want to automate the process so that manual intervention is not needed.

To help with one of these tasks, please contact Bryce Denney.

Latest News

• March 27, 2002: Bochs 1.4 is now available.
• March 11, 2002: Bochs 1.4.pre2 is now available.
• March 3, 2002: Bochs 1.4.pre1 is now available.
• December 10, 2001: ">Bochs 1.3 is now available
• November 17, 2001: ">Bochs 1.3.pre1 is now available.
• June 24, 2001: Thanks to Psyon, Bochs in the CVS now has CD-ROM support under Win9x.
• June 16, 2001: ">Bochs 1.2.1 is now available.
• June 3, 2001: ">Bochs 1.2 is now available in both source and binary form. Read all about this major new release over here.
• May 23, 2001: Activity Update - Less than a month after the transfer to Sourceforge, Bochs has reached the top of the SourceForge project activity chart! Thanks to Todd T. Fries for the update.
• May 22, 2001: Bochs is number two on the SourceForge project activity chart today!
• May 17, 2001: ">Bochs 1.1.2 is released, fixing several bugs found in the previous Bugfix2 release.
• May 12, 2001: After hovering around 10th place on the SourceForge activity rankings for the better part of a week, Bochs moves up even further! Bochs is listed as the 6th most active project on SF today.
• May 11, 2001: Our new site is released, with more information, a new screen shots section, CVS nightly tarballs, and much more!
• May 3, 2001: We are trying to gather a screenshot gallery of Bochs in action. If you have a screenshot you would like to share, please e-mail it to Tim Butler.
  

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