Dear Sarah, thank you so much for the incredible effort you poured into PCem over the years, both for the development and maintenance of the software and for offering support in the forum.
I just cannot fathom why people would treat you in such a horrible and ungrateful manner after you've given the community all this for free. As sad as it is to have to shut down a community, I understand your decision to close the PCem forum. Like others, I hope that there will be a way to release an archive of all the non-toxic posts in that forum, for the sake of knowledge preservation. But if it's too depressive to sift through, I completely understand.
Like some others here, I too have only started playing with PCem recently, and what made it so useful was its *accuracy* in emulating specific hardware. It was simply based on a different philosophy than for instance DOSBox, which aims to develop the best possible emulator for running DOS games, without emulating any piece of actually existing hardware in particular. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, and they each serve useful purposes that sometimes overlap, and sometimes don't. That's all good!
Thank you for sharing the code with the world, and best of luck (and fun!) with all of your future endeavours. Stay happy and healthy. 🤗
Perhaps that this has already been suggested by others here, but as a replacement for the PCem forum, perhaps the Vogons moderators can consider giving PCem a dedicated (sub)forum here, just like DOSBox and the various Glide wrappers?