Why 86Box Cares About One Core 86Box emulates an old PC at the hardware level. CPU timing, chipset behaviour, ISA and PCI buses, graphics chipsets, sound devices, and disk controllers all matter to getting period software to behave properly. That does not guarantee identical performance to the original hardware, as the Cinebench results below illustrate. Frankly the project is fascinating and the effort has me in awe, but that accuracy is expensive, and almost all of the cost lands on a single host thread. The practical consequence is quite straightforward in that core count barely matters here. What really matters is how fast one core can run, and how long it can hold that speed without throttling. Luckily for the Mac Mini here that's exactly where Apple Silicon has been strongest, and where the M6 shines. A little overclock... the M6 running a 650MHz Pentium II in my custom 86Box 6.0 build, with Cinebench 2000 and Winamp.…