The new version brings a ton of new enhancements and fixes to all 3 supported platforms, with Steam running not only on Arm64, but also on RiSC-V and on Loongarch! And this is the Linux version of Steam, not the Windows one (but the Windows one works too if you really prefer that one). While Box32 (used to run Steam) is still experimental and unstable, stability did improve. Still, expect some crashes when downloading things with steam. And it’s not all, Battle.net is also getting stable, and some games are working too. Not all unfortunately, and your success might depend on your geographical region, as program versions might differ. At least, you can try it on ARM64 & Loongarch. It’s still to be tested on RiSC-V.
↫ Box64 0.4.0 release announcement
These are some major improvements to Box64, and impressive ones at that.
It is great to see Box64 coming along as these kinds of technologies will really aid in bringing diversity back to the CPU landscape.
I am most excited about RISC-V and impressed that the software ecosystem is so mature even though viable RISC-V chips have not even appeared yet. We have multiple RISC-V Linux distributions, excellent support in both Clang and GCC, and tools like Box64. Even my AV1 encoder of choice fully supports RISC-V vector extensions for performance.
2026 will be the year that truly viable RISC-V chips appear with performance good enough for desktops, servers, and certainly SBC. Along with the RVA23 profile (bringing wide-scale software compatibility), RISC-V solutions can now start to develop and it is awesome that the Open Source ecosystem are ready to receive them. RISC-V is already wildly successful in microcontrollers but it is non-existent at the desktop and server level and a curiosity at best even in the SBC world today.
The SpacemiT K3 will likely be the first RVA23 core but the one I am really looking forward to is Ascalon (which may first appear for developers as the Tenstorrent Atlantis SoC). These will be the first chips to really take advantage of something like Box64.
We will see what Alibaba and Qualcomm have cooking as well.
It should be an interesting year.