Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini

The article discusses the performance of a Pentium II PC at 600MHz when emulated on an Apple M6 Mac Mini using 86Box software. 86Box is a hardware-level emulator that accurately replicates CPU timing, chipset behavior, graphics chipsets, sound devices, and disk controllers to ensure period software runs correctly. However, this level of accuracy comes at a cost, as the majority of the performance cost is borne by a single host thread.

In this case, the M6 Mac Mini's strong single-threaded performance makes it a suitable host for this emulation.

The article compares the emulation speed percentage of the M6 Mac Mini to a similar Mac Mini (Mac Mini M4) running at the same clock speeds. The M6 Mac Mini consistently achieved 100% emulation speed at 550MHz, 550MHz, and 600MHz, with the latter holding a flat 100% during both Cinebench 2000 runs and the 3DMark 2000 SE demo. This represents a 20% improvement over the M4 Mac Mini's maximum stable clock speed of 500MHz.

Interestingly, the article also compares the emulated Pentium II's performance to real-world benchmarks, noting that an emulated 600MHz Pentium II scored almost exactly as a 800MHz Coppermine Pentium II. This discrepancy might be due to differences in memory bandwidth and cache timing within the emulated machine. The highest passing clock speed achieved by the M6 Mac Mini in this setup was 600MHz, leaving a small margin of headroom for stability.