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PCEm. Another PC emulator.

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Reply 783 of 1046, by jk3one

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Ladies and gentlemen,

thanks to the hard work of the people over at PCem, there finally is a powerful and accurate emulator for PCs of the 198ies and 1990ies era. Go try it out, it is faithful hardware level emulation:
http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/

Its really fun, and already far more compatible then Dosbox. You can emulate everything from the original IBM PC (with original system roms) up to a Pentium MMX.

The caveat is that you have to set it up properly: The emulated PC will want its bios, the correct bios settings, its operating system, drivers... just like in the old days...

Reply 784 of 1046, by jk3one

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somehow forgot to mention all the cool things...
- it runs faithfully as an xt with cga composite graphics, playing booter games just like in the early eighties
- or it runs as a pentium mmx with windows 98 and 3dfx graphics, for games from 1995-2000
- it runs ms-dos, dr-dos, desqview, cpm86, os/2, all flavors of windows up to and including windows xp, linus thorvalds first version of linux or whatever else you want to throw at it... not that is makes much sense nowadays, but it is fun nevertheless, and in some cases might have practicals applications (for data preservation etc.)
- it emulates all kind of rare and weird hardware, from the pcjr and tandy-pc to serveral exotic soundcards, several graphics cards including the s3 virge (early accelerated graphics) up to voodoo of course

what you have to keep in mind is - apart from the need to set up an "almost real" pc, not just running an approximation like dosbox - that the speed has limits. I use an i7 2600 at 3.4 ghz and it gives me enough power to play win98 games with voodoo graphics and an emulated pentium mmx 233 mhz. thats the limit, 300 mhz (emulated) speed is already too fast for my system. but well, cant have everything

Reply 785 of 1046, by awgamer

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jk3one wrote:

somehow forgot to mention all the cool things...
- it runs faithfully as an xt with cga composite graphics, playing booter games just like in the early eighties

I guess you haven't run benchmarks on it, faithfully is not the adjective I would use, rough proximate.

Reply 787 of 1046, by PhilsComputerLab

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Might have to check it out.

A few noob questions:

Is there an easy way to transfer files between emulator and host, like a shared folder? Or are disk images the way to go.

YouTube, Facebook, Website

Reply 788 of 1046, by SA1988

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philscomputerlab wrote:

Might have to check it out.

A few noob questions:

Is there an easy way to transfer files between emulator and host, like a shared folder? Or are disk images the way to go.

disk images, there's no shared folder support, at least, yet.

Reply 791 of 1046, by deemster

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Hi! I read that one of the features of Pcem was that it emulates the AWE32 card. So i was eager to try it out. However the reverb/chorus in Aweutil didn't work, and Pcem seemed to route the midi to my default midi device. Is this supposed to be how Pcem handles this AWE32 emulation? I feel kinda scammed :p

Reply 793 of 1046, by SarahWalker

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It is actually mentioned in the readme :

Most EMU8000 functionality should work, however filters are not correct and reverb/chorus effects are not currently emulated.

Games/programs that access through the MPU-401 port at 0x330 will play through Windows MIDI, but games that access the EMU8000 directly will play through the actual emulation.

Reply 794 of 1046, by ecksemmess

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awgamer wrote:
jk3one wrote:

You mean, more or less rough proximate than dosbox with cycles set to something or other? 😀

Regardless of db cycles only relating to itself, DOSBox performance is actually more consistent than pcem last I checked.

Are you sure? My experience, and that of most people I know, has been the exact opposite of this. I love and respect DOSBox, but I'd be hard pressed to cite accuracy in speed and timing as one of its strong suits. I'm rarely able to get any game to run in DOSBox in such a way as to faithfully recreate the exact combination of speeds and timings that it would have on any particular real vintage PC. Of course, PCem isn't perfect either in that regard, and there is certainly plenty of software where it falls short in this area, but in a great many cases I've been able to get 99% of the way toward perfect mimicry of the performance/speed/timings I get on my various vintage PCs (checked side-by-side to avoid any possibility of wishful thinking). I haven't been able to say the same for DOSBox (which is totally understandable, given how different the aims of the two projects have been). If you could cite particular examples where you find that DOSBox is outperforming PCem in terms of accuracy of speed and timing, please do so--it will help us zero in on areas where there are still improvements to be made. More likely, it will give us an opportunity to point out limitations that we already know about or settings in PCem that you're not making use of. 😀

Reply 796 of 1046, by awgamer

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Should have a range as real world results can vary, sometimes wildly, depending on video card, x system settings as seen by: Phil's Ultimate VGA Benchmark Database Project
but roughly..
dosbox
xt@4.77 ~= 253 cycles
at@6 ~= 552 cycles
386@25 ~= 4700
486@66 ~= 23300
586@133 ~= 70600

Reply 797 of 1046, by ecksemmess

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Okay, but what makes you think that PCem is turning out less accurate results than DOSBox? Are you just saying that setting PCem to the settings on the left side of those equivalencies is giving substantially different results than setting DOSBox to the cycle counts on the right side? Even if that's true, I'm not sure what it's supposed to prove. What's necessary is to (1) compare PCem performance directly to a real PC with specs equivalent to the settings specified in PCem, (2) tweak the various minor settings in PCem to get its performance as close as possible to the real system, (3) take note of the remaining unresolvable timing discrepancies, and then (4) see if there's any way to get DOSBox to put out performance that matches the target system more closely than PCem with the tweaks finalized in (2). I've done that, and PCem tends to win by extraordinarily impressive margins most of the time, in my experience. Until you've done tests along those lines, I honestly have no idea what you think you've demonstrated.

Reply 798 of 1046, by Silanda

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Cool emulator, with two caveats so far for me, both regarding sound.

Firstly, the sounds don't quite sound right. It's hard to explain. Sometimes the high frequencies sound slightly filtered, but at other times they sound hissy. The sound seems to change between the two states seamlessly as the emulator is running.

Secondly, and most importantly for me, the sound is slightly lagged. Unfortunately, it lags enough to be clearly noticeable in things like video playback.