Thanks for the fix!

Past week I compiled the PCem source too. Using Code::Blocks IDE + MinGW compiler + (Allegro) DirectX 9 libraries + attached OpenAL library.
The additional SVN sound and video hardware choices are much appreciated.

Mostly the skill required for understanding the core of this emulator is beyond me. I merely added a windows icon and version info. Then made i430vx ROM use its own nvr file to store its settings, but the i430vx is too unfinished to use anyways, it seems.

Adding "TRIO64 (Ver. 1.5-07) [VGA] (S3 Incorporated).bin" does not trigger any additional video option, the rest works fine. S3 and 'cirrus logic' can actually run PCPbench in VESA mode.

gerwin wrote:

but the i430vx is too unfinished to use anyways, it seems.

There are some missing features, but the i430vx emulation does actually work; I wouldn't have included it if it didn't. What issues are you seeing?

Is it possible to use this 10/10/94 AMI WinBIOS somehow? I get black screen.

SarahWalker wrote:

gerwin wrote:

but the i430vx is too unfinished to use anyways, it seems.

There are some missing features, but the i430vx emulation does actually work; I wouldn't have included it if it didn't. What issues are you seeing?

Looking at the i430VX again, these things come to mind:
-It stores its settings in the hot-433 nvr.
-Keyboard at some bootups not read properly, Then I can enter the bios but cannot navigate there at all.
-It is picky about my 40MB harddisk image, could not find BIOS settings to reliably access it: I settled with configuring it floppy-only.

The CPU choice for this board is rather limited (just IDT Winchip) , but I suppose that is because of PCem CPU emulation in general.

On a side note,
when graphics are fine and smooth, the audio samples have very high latency: they are played like a second after they should play.

leileilol wrote:

Is it possible to use this 10/10/94 AMI WinBIOS somehow? I get black screen.

Only if the UMC chipset emulation is improved. As I mentioned above with regards to the HOT-433 (which uses the same chipset), this is unlikely.

While swapping A: disks in a subfolder within PCem, sometimes the hard drive will just be lost on the next boot and there'll be 0kb hdc.img and hdd.img files in the disks subfolder where I mounted floppies from.

A dumb question... will be there an "official" build for those that doesn't want to compile their own?

Zup wrote:

A dumb question... will be there an "official" build for those that doesn't want to compile their own?

Eventually. The next release is some time away.

SarahWalker, you need these files to add Pentium emulation.

justincase wrote:

SarahWalker, you need these files to add Pentium emulation.

I suspect adding Pentium emulation is not nearly as simple as you think it is, sir.

Perhaps, as above, you could explain why you think Pentium emulation is necessary and why you want it so badly? I do not think it is going to make the emulation any faster. Quite the contrary.

To be fair, some DOS games require a Pentium for one reason or another.

Some of those games usually measure the "Pentium" requirement through brief benchmarking like MDK does. It's possible to bypass the "REQUIRES A PENTIUM!!!" by hacking in a definition for a 450mhz 486 in the PCem code, and there aren't that many DOS games that strictly expect a Pentium processor anyway, because it would also shut off the AMD K5/K6 and Cyrix 6x86 users, which are also important to support since budget gamers often went for these Pentium alternatives.

There is however some late Windows 95 games that use the RDTSC instruction to grab the clock rate of the processor (usually for setup/config screens or even installs), and it will fail on 486s and under.

Unless this was more on about simulating the FDIV bug...

I was going to say something about the Pentium using a different instruction set, but then I thought that didn't sound right at all.

Still, there is such a thing as code optimized for a Pentium processor, so there has to be some kind of difference, right?

Most of the difference will simply be in instruction scheduling. As PCem will not attempt to emulate Pentium instruction timing while it's still an interpreter (it's quite complex to do in real time), adding Pentium emulation will not affect this at all.

RDTSC is supported when emulating a Winchip, and this allows at least some Pentium-only games (eg Final Fantasy 7) to work. There are a few more instructions (eg CMPXCHG8B) that games will almost certainly never use, a few OS-level features that Windows 9x doesn't use, and as leileilol says most Pentium-only checks will be simple benchmarking.

Pentium emulation is required to run Windows XP on PCem.

Why would you want to run XP on a retro PC emulator!?!!?

The nerve of some people.... you can barely get by Win2000 on a 486.

I don't really see the point when there's plenty of other VM software that can run XP fine already.

You probably cannot activate your XP on PCem anyway.

Because XP is the final Windows version to work on a P5 Pentium.

I think sticking a pencil in your eye is a less painful experience than running XP on a Pentium 😀

leileilol wrote:

I don't really see the point when there's plenty of other VM software that can run XP fine already.

And even with 3D acceleration and other niceties.

If you want to run XP really, really slowly for some silly reason, you might as well just use Bochs.

Anyone want to make a list of supported MSS/WSS drivers in PCem?

So far i've only tried Turtle Beach Monte Carlo with moderate success (no CS4231 detection in DOS for the SB emulation TSR but the Win3.1 drivers work complete with Vsynth)