Mac Mini M6 sustains 600MHz Pentium II emulation in review
A modified 86Box build held 100% emulation speed during tests, while the tested M4 passed at 500MHz.
A review published on 25 September reports that a Mac Mini M6 sustained a 600MHz Pentium II emulation in a modified 86Box 6.0 build. The result was the highest setting to meet the reviewer’s strict pass criteria: 100% emulation speed throughout, with no audible dropouts.
The test ran Cinebench 2000 alongside Winamp audio, and also included a 3DMark 2000 SE demo. At 600MHz, the M6 maintained full speed through both Cinebench runs and the demo, which lasted seven to eight minutes.
In the same setup, the tested Mac Mini M4 passed at 500MHz but began hitching at 550MHz. The review therefore put the M6’s highest passing clock 20% above the M4’s.
The comparison used a custom build based on 86Box 6.0, with extended clock options and an ARM64 Voodoo graphics recompiler. The reviewer credited both the software improvements and Apple Silicon’s fast cores, but did not measure the contribution from the modified build against an earlier version.
The M6 did not pass at 650MHz: the run completed, but had audible underruns. The review reports one run per clock setting, leaving repeatability unclear. Its benchmark scores describe the emulated system and do not establish equivalent performance to physical Pentium II or Pentium III hardware.
