NOTE: Corrected stupid mistake for Tandy 1000 and PC3086, both now boot without problem.

Ramon

Some people in this thread a few pages back dumped their own awe32.

Ramon Zarat wrote:

NOTE: Corrected stupid mistake for Tandy 1000 and PC3086, both now boot without problem.

Ramon

you mean PC2086?
PC3086 is still not booting.

you mean PC2086?
PC3086 is still not booting.

Sorry, I should have mentioned; It does boot, but you must select CPU speed between 9.54 and 12Mhz. Anything higher or lower and you get the "Error: Faulty Direct Access controller". Strange...

Sarah, I didn't realize you already implemented the NMI handling, can hear the SBOS in all its splendor in Ultrabots!

Jarvik7 wrote:

Some people in this thread a few pages back dumped their own awe32.

Indeed. I love old PC, console and arcade preservation. I also have 4 retro PC (P54S 120, P3-450, P3-1Ghz and Tualatin 1.3Ghz) but no awe32...

Also, PCem is quite unique in the emulation world. Dosbox is great, but its approach is very different and over that, you have Virtualbox and VMWare. Not much anything else in between, even if you consider Bochs, QEMU or MESS. PCem feels like the real thing and is very easy to use!

Other projects that got my attention at some point is Dioscuri ( http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/ ), unfortunately it's not been updated since 2011... There is also PCE specifically for the IBM 5150 series ( http://www.hampa.ch/pce/download.html ). But the only other emulator that closely resemble PCem is WadiM's ScriptPC, now known as 2 different emulators: SPCXT and SPCAT ( http://soviet-pc.narod.ru/ ). Those last 2 are worth looking at if you don't know them already.

Cheers,

Ramon

Ramon Zarat wrote:

Also, PCem is quite unique in the emulation world. Dosbox is great, but its approach is very different and over that, you have Virtualbox and VMWare. Not much anything else in between, even if you consider Bochs, QEMU or MESS. PCem feels like the real thing and is very easy to use!

Other projects that got my attention at some point is Dioscuri ( http://dioscuri.sourceforge.net/ ), unfortunately it's not been updated since 2011... There is also PCE specifically for the IBM 5150 series ( http://www.hampa.ch/pce/download.html ). But the only other emulator that closely resemble PCem is WadiM's ScriptPC, now known as 2 different emulators: SPCXT and SPCAT ( http://soviet-pc.narod.ru/ ). Those last 2 are worth looking at if you don't know them already.

Spot on! I've spent years with all the emulators you listed and they all have at least a few annoying downsides. We really do owe a debt of gratitude to Sarah for this project. It's like the best aspects of each other emulator rolled into one. A few more tweaks, additions and fixes (Windows NT anyone?) and it'll be the undisputed king of PC emulators.

Hello everyone and thank you Sarah

but I can ask if I would ever be possible in the future to do a Hyper-Treading as PCEM running 25% on four cores and nothing more.

And it makes max cpu 75Mhz otherwise everything works cool but when I choose a processor 80 90 100 MHZ and more. PCEM running at 100%, but maybe 80% and begins to cut the sound, etc.

I think that if PCEM able to use all 4 cores would it be OK?

Ramon thanks very much for the roms, i'd already downloaded them from your post at retroroms in the bios files thread.

I have some bug report. I already mentioned PC3086 only boot correctly with CPU speed between 9.54Mhz and 12Mhz :

1- Europc won't boot (black screen) with either Number Nine 9FX or ATI Graphics Pro Turbo card.

2- Tandy 1000 crash 9 time out of 10 when you already booted, change a spec (sound card, memory) and re-boot. The only way around this I've found is to boot another machine (IE PC1512), select Tandy 1000 back, change the spec and reset. With this "2 steps trick" I can now boot Tandy 1000 with any combination of sound and ram.

3- The demo "Unreal" ( http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=1274 ) sound strange (weird left and right channel shift) when choosing Soundblaster pro @ 20Khz in the demo menu, even with the autoexec.bat soundblaster environment changed to "T4". (yes, my IRQ is set to 7 and DMA to 1). Tried with PCem soundblaster pro version 1 and 2. Works great when choosing soundblaster (non-pro) in the demo menu.

4- The demo "untitled" ( http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=64 ) has sound for the first 2 seconds, and then stops, no matter what type of sound card is being used in PCem. Works fine in Dosbox. (My PCem GUS setup is not done yet, didn't test with that card).

5- The demo "Caero" ( http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=2163 ) works well with sound Blaster 2.0 option in PCem (don't work so well with pro, SB16 and awe32). Unfortunately, sound level is way too low. It could be raised 100%-200% no problem.

6- The demo "Juice" ( http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=69 ) barely play nearly inaudible sound when selecting the sound blaster pro option in the demo menu. No sound at all when selecting soundblaster16. That's with PCEm either SB pro or SB16 emulation.

Ramon

Windows NT actually boots on PCem, just the cdrom install that does not work (it doesn't recognize the cdrom even when inserted) but overall, it boots and one thing that it needs is a built-in kernel debugger for COM2 (Windows NT October 1991 beta needs this), oh well, only time will tell 😀

So for those of you with more time than me, what is the best BIOS, video BIOS and PC version to run Windows 98? And which would work best on this emulator, the original 98 or 98 SE?

I've only bothered with the AMI WinBIOS 486 at best. I never ran Win98 on it - just Win95. My computer struggles emulating a 100mhz 486 😀

valnar wrote:

So for those of you with more time than me, what is the best BIOS, video BIOS and PC version to run Windows 98? And which would work best on this emulator, the original 98 or 98 SE?

I can't answer from experience, but logically your best bet should be the 430VX, using the standard Award BIOS that TSarah wants us to use with it. She also recommends using the ATI Graphics Pro Turbo (Mach64GX) for anything around the higher end of PCem's tech spectrum, though of course there's always the Number Nine 9FX (S3 Trio64) to fall back on if necessary. Supposedly, both 98 and 98 SE install and run fine with no problems, so you can take your pick. Keep in mind, of course, that v8 and the 430VX are still young, so may theoretically be less stable and mature than some of the machines that have been well established in the project for years. I'm running an Ivy Bridge i7 host with 8 GB RAM, and I've had nothing but smooth sailing with PCem set to 430VX/Mach64GX, with the WinChip C6 at 133 MHz, but you may need to experiment to set the speed to whatever your system can handle.

about the S3 on PCem, the Bahamas64 is a better choice than the Number Nine 9FX 330.
The Bahamas64 still has a few bugs, here I list them:
1. on Windows 3.1x, Write.exe has scrambled colors with the S3 Vision864 drivers in either 8bpp, 15bpp, 16bpp or 32bpp.
2. on both Windows 3.1x and 9x, 1600x1200 is not handled properly. (hmm, I wonder if the VPC S3 drivers can be put here :p)

various bug reports

Thanks for these people, looks like v8 was released a little prematurely. I'll probably put out a maintenance release in the next week or so to mop these up.

ih8registrations wrote:

FYI, gusmax is a gus with wss compatible dac on a different port.

I thought of adding GUS MAX support, but wasn't aware of much in the way of supported software. Are drivers available anywhere? I haven't seen any that are specifically for the MAX.

various ROM requests

I'm not putting any more ROM images on my site. Everything that was added for this release (except for AWE32) has ROM images available somewhere on the internet. I'm also not providing the Dell or Acer ROMs, even I don't have entirely good images of them; the physical ROMs I used appear to have bit-rot....

Buricz wrote:

I think that if PCEM able to use all 4 cores would it be OK?

PCem is very much a single threaded emulator and is likely to stay that way. Offloading video acceleration to another thread would buy some performance in certain cases (especially when/if I emulate any 3D accelerators) but it isn't really possible to spread CPU emulation over multiple cores.

valnar wrote:

So for those of you with more time than me, what is the best BIOS, video BIOS and PC version to run Windows 98? And which would work best on this emulator, the original 98 or 98 SE?

I'd use 430vx if your machine is fast enough, sis496 if not, probably with mach64gx. I think all the 9x family work okay, but as PCem emulates mainly 486-era hardware the earlier the better; I mainly stick to 95 OSR2.

Sarah Walker, are you sure that WinME runs on PCem?

Well I've run it myself...

SarahWalker wrote:

I'd use 430vx if your machine is fast enough, sis496 if not, probably with mach64gx. I think all the 9x family work okay, but as PCem emulates mainly 486-era hardware the earlier the better; I mainly stick to 95 OSR2.

Hmm. Seeing that VxD drivers probably work better with PCEm than WDM drivers, I'll stick with OSR2 or Win98 first edition and see where that takes me. Thanks.

SarahWalker wrote:

I thought of adding GUS MAX support, but wasn't aware of much in the way of supported software. Are drivers available anywhere? I haven't seen any that are specifically for the MAX.

Yep, there is, maxsbos, attached below.