Spotlight: BOCHS is a Pentium PC emulator for Android, brings on the retro cult

What's a BOCHS? Well, in this case, it certainly has nothing to do with your uncle's German power drill. It's actually more of a Pentium PC emulator that can run a full-blown x86 operating system on your Android device. It all boils down to installing the application and some related content, then putting a hard disk image of your preferred operating system on your device's storage and getting the emulator to work with it.

Of course, your smartphone is a touchscreen device, not a keyboard and mouse one, so how do you do controls once Windows XP is running on your Nexus 5? BOCHS emulates a touchpad with left/right mouse buttons, and there's also an on-screen keyboard available if you want to fire up MSN Messenger out of nostalgia and whatnot.

Developers can also modify bochs for direct access to the device's NAND memory, but be warned that this could damage your file system. Getting sound support for those old WinAmp versions with custom Quake III Arena skins is a bit of an adventure too. You have to modify a particular text file and make sure your OS has SoundBlaster 16 drivers installed (not even joking). Microsoft's distributions should be having this pre-installed.

If you're feeling adventurous and want to give BOCHS a spin, you may do so from the XDA developers board below.

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