Welcome to VARCem, the Virtual Archaeological Computer EMulator.
VARCem is a software application which emulates a selection of of (mostly) x86-based PC systems and devices based on the ISA, VLB, MCA and PCI buses.
The program tries to be cycle-exact, meaning the guest software (the software being run inside the emulated system) will run as fast (or, depending on how you see that..) as slow as it did "back then". If you selected, say, a 80286 running at 12MHz, that is what the software will see, and how fast it will be run.
VARCem started out as a new branch of the 86Box emulator, after discussions on which path to follow forward. 86Box in its own is a fork of the popular PCem emulator. At each generation, code and ideas were taken from other emulator projects, such as DOSBox, Vbox, MAME, Qemu and so on.
VARCem as a whole is released under the BSD 3-Clause Open Software License, which is compatible with the GPL (GNU Public License) version 2 or later that is used by many of the modules imported from other emulator projects. Author credits and specific copyrights can be found in each of the source files.
Obviously, where license terms of individual modules deviate from the general project license terms, the terms of such an individual module prevail.
Information, downloads, additional modules and such can be found on our Website. Live support and general help can also be found on our Discord server. We no longer use the IRC network.
Additionally, documentation can be found (once it is written..) on the Wiki, and general discussions and support can be found at the Forum where you can find announcements, leave bug reports, and so on.
"This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE."
It's free, it comes with all the sources, but it does not come with any warranty whatsoever. You probably should not use this software to run a business-critical piece of (old) software at work, for example.
If there is a problem with the software, please open up a GIT issue so we can work on it, and/or talk to us on the IRC channel. We cannot promise a fix, but will try the best we can !
The auto-builds handled by CircleCI are
Last Updated: 2023/02/23