How to run Windows from an emulator on a non x86 host machine?

Windows runs on x86 based CPUs only. Is it possible to make Windows run on n开发者_开发问答on-x86 architecture CPUs like POWER, SPARC, ARM, etc.?

I know that there is a program viz., Virtual PC 7 for Mac that allows Windows to be run on PowerPC inside MacOS but not much detail is available. I'm talking about virtualization in a sense that allows HOST and GUEST machines CPU architectures be different.

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Try QEMU: http://www.qemu.org/index.html.

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Take a look at DOSBox (an x86 emulator) its an open source project that emulates x86 runs on a lot of platforms, and can even run Windows 3.11 on those platforms.

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Windows runs on x86 based CPUs only

That's incorrect. Actually Windows ran on various different architectures such as IA-64 (Itanium), ARM (win CE, win RT, Windows phone...), DEC Alpha and even PowerPC, MIPS. Currently only x86 and ARM are supported. The last Windows for Itanium is Windows Server 2008 R2. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows#Platform_support

Many versions of Windows themselves can emulate other architectures. For instance Windows on Itanium has an emulation layer for running x86 applications on Itanium. The latest Windows on ARM also has a WOW64 layer to run 32-bit x86 code on 64-bit Windows on ARM. In the future it may subsequently gain the ability to execute 64-bit x86 code. Windows on PowerPC, Alpha and MIPS can emulate an x86 PC, too. See Did Windows NT 4 emulate x86 on non-Intel platforms?

But talking only about emulators then perhaps qemu and bochs are the most well-known ones

Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86 CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS. Bochs can be compiled to emulate many different x86 CPUs, from early 386 to the most recent x86-64 Intel and AMD processors which may even not reached the market yet.

Bochs is capable of running most Operating Systems inside the emulation including Linux, DOS or Microsoft Windows. Bochs was originally written by Kevin Lawton and is currently maintained by this project.

DosBox is also popular but it only supports real mode and protected mode, thus can only run Windows up to 3.x. It mainly focuses on running DOS-games, not Windows

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Regarding the original title Instruction Set Virtualization, there are lots of emulators out there

If you're a gamer maybe you'll know some NES, gamecube, PlayStation 1, 2... emulators on Windows such as ePSXe...

Previous versions of MacOS X has Rosetta for emulating PowerPC on x86. When migrating from 68k to PowerPC they also used a Mac68k emulator to smooth the transition