dr.zeissler wrote on 2022-12-13, 12:47:
What would you recommend testing if the win30 machine has only 1MB Ram and 286/8Mhz?
Hi, sorry to kept you waiting.
I think you can safely try the "Baby" Mark 1 Simulator.
It simulates an early experimental computer of the 1940's.
Hm. The Winfocom interpreter for the text-adventures may works, too.
And CowChip, the IMSAI/ALTAIR and Z80 CPU simulators.
The COSMAC ELF simulator..
The later must be run in "slow mode", no kidding!
It's hard to say, I guess.
Technically, all those plain 16-Bit emulators visible in the screenshot do run, too.
Problem is performance, RAM and the colour-depth.
With a few more MHz, the 80286 CPU would handle them nicely.
A 25 MHz model isn't required, even. A 16 MHz model would be fine.
A 12 or 10 MHz one would be usable for the simple stuff.
The PC/AT emulation I had chosen is very slow, unfortunately.
PCem emulates the waistates and slow memory of the AT dutifully, too.
By comparison, my Schneider AT PC is much more responsive
(has 2 MHz more) and runs ISA at 10 MHz.
Then there's the VGA.. PCem's selection is wastly. For 386+ machines.
So far, I've merely got the OAK OTI-67 to work in 256c in Standard-Mode.
It has "286 or better" drivers listen in oemsetup.inf..
However, the OAK drivers are slow compared to "VGA" or "Super VGA (800x600)".
Both on real hardware and on emulated hardware.
Well, the 800x600 256c version is very sluggish, at least.
The 640x480 256c version is sort of "ok". I use that for now.
Tip: You can use the screen savers as a benchmark to see how fast images are being drawn.
"Flying Windows" does a good job here, I think, because moving objects change in size.
The only alternatives to the OAK so far are the ET-4000 and the Paradise PVGA1A (not in PCem 10.1).
But the drivers I found cause video corruption in Standard-Mode for some reason.
Except those old ones written for Windows 2.x, which use Real-Mode:
The Paradise drivers always worked for me (in Windows 2.03 and 3.0/Real-Mode).
Hm. I wished the older ET-3000 was emulated, as well.
That being said, not all programs require 256 colours.
But that ZX Spectrum emulator does, for example.
RAM. In PCem, selecting "1MB" does disable Extended Memory.
So I chose "2MB" instead, giving 640KB+1024KB.
This seems to be enough to run one progream each time.
I'm using the "Run" command in Program Manager here and no wallpaper.
Good luck! 😀
PS: Funnily, some of the emulators using WinG would run, too.
But WinG itself does require a 386 for working,
which is understandable. It was made for speed, literally.
If someone wrote a replacement for WING.DLL,
Some WinG applications would perhaps start working on a 286.
The underlying GDI itself is 16-Bit, after all.
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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel
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