Special thanks

2ksbox stands on projects that took years of other people's work. These are the ones a machine could not run without. The complete list of components and their licences is in the repository's third-party notices.

The machine

QEMU: The emulator everything runs on. 2ksbox is a patched QEMU 9.2, linked in-process by the player.
qemu-3dfx: KJ Liew’s OpenGL pass-through for period guests, which is how Quake II reaches your GPU.
SeaBIOS: The VGA BIOSes the machines boot with.
86Box and PCem: The Voodoo 2 is 86Box’s chip emulation, itself descended from Sarah Walker’s PCem. Glide games run on it with 3dfx’s own driver.
EDK2: The UEFI firmware a Windows 11 machine boots with, Secure Boot included.
libtpms and OpenSSL: The TPM 2.0 behind a Windows 11 machine, so stock install media accepts it.
virtio-win: The drivers disc for a Windows 11 machine’s display and network devices.

Direct3D

DXVK: The host executor of 2ksbox’s paravirtual Direct3D device: the guest’s Direct3D calls become Vulkan through DXVK’s d3d9.
Wine: Runs the Direct3D executor on a host without Vulkan 1.3, so older GPUs and older Macs still get Direct3D.
KosmicKrisp and the Vulkan SDK: Mesa’s Vulkan driver on Metal, from LunarG, which is what makes the fast Direct3D path possible on macOS 26.

The picture

libretro slang shaders: The CRT shader collection, written by the RetroArch community over many years. Every preset 2ksbox ships a profile for comes from here.
librashader: Runs those presets outside RetroArch, on wgpu.
wgpu and winit: The graphics layer and the window the player draws in, on all three hosts.

Sound and input

Nuked-OPL3: The Sound Blaster’s FM chip, cycle-accurate. 2ksbox uses the Rust port.
Munt: The MT-32 and CM-32L, through the Rust port. Bring your own ROMs.
RustySynth and TimGM6mb: The General MIDI synthesizer and the bank it plays, by Tim Brechbill and David Bolton.
cpal and gilrs: Audio output and gamepads on Linux, Windows and macOS.

Building it

Rust: The player, the launcher’s core, the disc backend and the music engines are Rust.
GTK 4 and gtk4-rs: The launcher’s user interface on Linux. On Windows and macOS it uses the system’s own WinUI 3 and AppKit.
Open Watcom v2: Builds the Windows 98 display driver. Still the compiler for that job.
MinGW-w64: Builds the guest tools for Windows XP and Windows 7.