VMware

VMWare is basically the rich man's Bochs. It can run any number of "Guest Operating Systems" and can boot from real media or image files. It is also a lot easier to configure than bochs. Website is at http://www.vmware.com/.

Unfortunately, VMWare is not designed to help the hobbyist discover his or her own faults. There's virtually no debugging info except for obscure error codes that can be forwarded to vmware.com ... so it's rather like having a second "real" box instead of the debugging sandbox Bochs provides.

Please note: VMware is not an emulator. There is lot of differnce between an emulator and a virtual machine monitor. Emulators, like Bochs, emulate each instruction, whereas VMWare (and Virtual PC) try to run most of the code on the host PC directly, and only emulate instructions that create invalid instruction faults or access system-level memory.

VMWare Server is the same as above, but a free download from www.vmware.com. Currently it is in Beta State. They say in the related FAQ that the final version of VMWare Server will remain free. It does lack some of the convenience functions VMWare Workstation offers, but it is stable and nice.

Note: On 64-bit Windows systems using AMD processors, a patch is required for virtual machines to function correctly. The patch can be downloaded from Microsoft