Running 86Box.exe directly

Starting virtual machines outside of Manager

As you probably noticed, the Manager is a completely separate program that interacts with the main 86Box program (86Box.exe) to provide you some virtual machine management capabilities. This also means you can still bypass the Manager completely and start your virtual machines directly by running 86Box.exe with the appropriate -P command line argument.

However, if you do this and then try to start the Manager, you'll get a warning saying this is a bad idea and the Manager will then close immediately. Why?

Well, to provide you with some VM management features, the Manager has to keep track of which VMs are currently running - it has to keep an eye on running processes of 86Box.exe. If you start a VM from the Manager, everything is fine, because the Manager has all the necessary information to know which VM is running in which 86Box instance. But if you start 86Box.exe directly, there's no way for the Manager to know which VM you started, and this can lead to file in use issues and other unpredictable situations that are best avoided entirely. That's why I decided it's best to warn the user and quit.

You'll also see a warning when you have a running VM and you try to close the Manager before closing the VM. This is related to the above situation, in the sense that if you close the Manager but keep the VM running, then restart the Manager, you'll hit the same issue I described above. Currently, you can either close the Manager anyway or cancel. In a future release, I'll add an option to also close any and all running VMs before closing the manager.

So, long story short: if you intend to use the Manager to manage your 86Box VMs, I recommend you use only the Manager and avoid running 86Box.exe directly. You're free to do otherwise, at your own risk of course.