86box seems to be the successor of PCem, a GUI Emulator that is capable of emulating full Hardware (incl. Settings and BIOS/firmware) via GUI selection. I use it for old games, because emulating of 3dfx and similar is also possible in an easy way.

Maybe this can be done with blink, but probably not by selecting a few dropdowns and clicking some buttons...

Pcem is still being actively developed, even though Sarah Walker said she wasn't working on it anymore.

Successor or fork?

I am not sure about the details, but I seem to remember it was not a very amicable fork.

It's a fork, going back some years (2017 or so).

It's instructive to look at the activity level of pcem (their forum, and their github account: https://github.com/sarah-walker-pcem/pcem/commits/dev/) versus 86box ( https://github.com/86Box/86Box/commits/master/ )

86box has a vibrant community around it (pop in the discord some time!) which PCEM really doesn't as far as I'm able to tell.

Yes, there is a lot of bad blood -but I would suggest taking any stories that you hear (but did not witness yourself) with a huge grain of salt.

There is also a video about PCEm with a reference to 86box from LTT:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWEE2RJj3YI

Found this pretty interesting how to use in practise.

Not at all. Blink according to themselves is:

> blink is a virtual machine that runs x86-64-linux programs on different operating systems and hardware architectures.

Where 86Box is, according to themselves:

> 86Box is a low level x86 emulator that runs older operating systems and software designed for IBM PC systems and compatibles from 1981 through fairly recent system designs based on the PCI bus.

Blink seems to be closer to qemu-user or box86/box64[0].

0. https://box86.org/