I want to doing emulate old games and old Windows 3.1 for just for fun. But, I want the VM with old hardware emulation feature (like processor, cache, sound card, and more). I already trying PCem, but it's not enough for me.
I am new in this forum
Sorry for my bad English
Uh, DOSBox?
VogonsDrivers.com | Link | News Thread
Is DOSBox can emulate 486, Pentium, 3dfx Voodoo, SoundBlaster AWE32, and more legacy hardware?
There's also MESS (which supports Pentium), though you'd have to build your own PC through the source code. It was unstable when I last tried though.
No 3dfx, yet
No AWE32 since you can use external midi devices that load soundfonts and other than that there is no use for special awe32 emulation.
wrote:No 3dfx, yet
No AWE32 since you can use external midi devices that load soundfonts and other than that there is no use for special awe32 emulation.
I'm pretty sure DOSBox already has limited 3dfx Glide support, though I have yet to actually try it out myself.
As for reasons for special AWE32 emulation: Eradicator. Something tells me that game taps directly into the exposed EMU8000 registers instead of going through MIDI, in which case General MIDI devices that can load the game's SoundFonts and apply reverb and chorus on the fly are useless.
There's a faq question with Eradicator that "why are piano sounds are playing" so it's just playing sounds to MIDI with soundfont mapping sound effects to notes.
NamelessPlayer, there is a patch for 3dfx support and yes, yhkwong offers this, but official Dosbox SVN does not have 3dfx support *at all*
wrote:There's a faq question with Eradicator that "why are piano sounds are playing" so it's just playing sounds to MIDI with soundfont mapping sound effects to notes.
That is the gist of what it's doing with AWE sound mode, but I figured they'd try and tap into the EMU8000 directly. Meanwhile, there's still music playing, so I figured that they somehow tapped into the ROM samples for the music while still using the RAM for the loaded SoundFont.
Still, this calls for an actual hardware comparison between an actual AWE32/64 and one of my more modern machines running DOSBox with the game's SoundFont loaded into my X-Fi card.
wrote:NamelessPlayer, there is a patch for 3dfx support and yes, yhkwong offers this, but official Dosbox SVN does not have 3dfx support *at all*
Thanks for the clarification.
It's similar to how official DOSBox builds don't have MT-32 emulation support.
The music is a 22050hz 16bit stereo PCM stream mixed by the CPU or redbook CD audio tracks (optional)
Virtual PC will run Windows 3.1 fine.
I don't think that any software (virtualization or emulator) will simulate cache. Virtualization will not simulate any speed limit, and the speed limit in dosbox is quite rough. Usually a finer control shouldn't be necessary since after the first IBM PC there where so many different machines with different speeds that most games weren't that speed-sensitive.
Stuff like this will only need to be emulated for consoles.
wrote:I don't think that any software (virtualization or emulator) will simulate cache.
PCem allows specification of processor, video bus speed and cache (which does affect performance - I usually have it set to "a bit" to go for m919-ish performance).
wrote:The music is a 22050hz 16bit stereo PCM stream mixed by the CPU
I almost forgot that CPUs in the mid-1990s were getting powerful enough to allow for software audio mixing like that to get around DOS sound cards' lack of hardware PCM polyphony/channels.
I'm all too used to DOS games having their audio limited to the sound card's specifications like that, sort of like how I'd expect DirectSound3D-based games to outright drop sounds if they exceed the sound card's hardware polyphony/channels (32 for SB Live!, 64 for Audigy, 128 for X-Fi).
