VOGONS


First post, by Elia1995

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Hi, I've just discovered these 2 emulators called PCem and 86box, which are similar to each other, but 86box comes with a little bit more features and even fixes the cursor issue I had on PCem (on PCem the cursor flies all over and just disappears, while on 86box I can use it just fine).

I set a virtual machine with a Pentium MMX 233, ISA Sound Blaster AWE32, 128MB of RAM (I typed in 256 and 512, but as the virtual machine starts, it always goes back to 128MB for some reason), an .iso image as a CD-ROM and floppy emulation.
I installed MS-DOS 6.22 and on top of it I installed Windows 95, it installed just fine, along with some drivers and a few games, BUT the virtual machine lags a lot !!! I don't have anything opened up besides the emulator and it lags, the sound stutters and makes horrible farting noises even during the bios screen, it's so annoying.

I wish I could get 86box to work properly, because it looks like a great virtual machine emulator with better compatibility to old Windows 3.x, 9x and DOS than VMWare...

My PC has 16GB of DDR3 ram, an i7-4790K CPU @4.00 GHz and a GTX 1060 6GB ROG STRIX as graphics card, I'd say more than enough good to emulate a Pentium-MMX 233...

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 1 of 8, by superfury

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The difficult part of such heavier OSes is mostly emulating them at full speed. PCem and other emulators that use full CPU emulation(cycle-accurate or not) instead of dynamic recompilation won't easily run at 100% realtime speed. Since it's not running at 100% speed, sound produced is below 100% as well, causing sound to stutter(since the hardware doesn't produce sound as fast as the real audio card renders it, thus the stuttering). Especially at higher clock speeds(say 5MHz and up for cycle-accurate, maybe 10KIPS for a simple inaccurate non-cycle accurate CPU emulator).

Even UniPCemu, which is already heavily optimized on a i7-4790K(8GB RAM) can't get above 75% with about 275KIPS. 50% with cycle-accurate 4.77MHz. 20% with 80386-16MHz.

Author of the UniPCemu emulator.
UniPCemu Git repository
UniPCemu for Android, Windows, PSP, Vita and Switch on itch.io

Reply 2 of 8, by Elia1995

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So what's the best configuration to get 100% emulation speed on 86box ?

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard

Reply 3 of 8, by superfury

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Probaby some minimal setup with least accuracy, dynarec CPU emulation and as much hardware as possible disabled? It's as they say: accuracy takes power. So decrease most settings to their minimal values(CPU clock speed, IPS instead of cycle-accurate, minimum hardware emulation/accuracy). All little bits help.

Last edited by superfury on 2017-12-24, 09:57. Edited 1 time in total.

Author of the UniPCemu emulator.
UniPCemu Git repository
UniPCemu for Android, Windows, PSP, Vita and Switch on itch.io

Reply 4 of 8, by DosFreak

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Haven't tested 13.1 yet but from forums threads I've read it's more accurate now so slower, so try a slower emulated cpu. (I'm refering to pcem not 86box)

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Reply 5 of 8, by SA1988

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You need a more powerful CPU and mobo.
The reason why on some boards you can't set more than 128MB of ram is because the 86box team prefers to set it per how the emulated motherboard originally supported the highest amount of ram when it shipped.

For Windows 95 lagging, you might want AmnHLT (a VXD driver for Win9x, including WinME) to reduce the lag significantly.
Download link is below the screenshot.

Some simple screenshot of Windows 98 SE.
53PIWen.png

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Reply 6 of 8, by Jo22

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For Windows 95 lagging, you might want AmnHLT (a VXD driver for Win9x, including WinME) to reduce the lag significantly.

Cool, it reminds me of WQGHLT, which I'm sometimes using for Windows 3.1 (in VMs).

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Reply 7 of 8, by dr_st

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Is there any setup you own that does not produce farting noises? 😜
search.php?keywords=farting&terms=all&author= … 0&submit=Search

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Reply 8 of 8, by Elia1995

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dr_st wrote:

Is there any setup you own that does not produce farting noises? 😜
search.php?keywords=farting&terms=all&author= … 0&submit=Search

🤣 probably not yet, except my main PC D:

Currently assembled vintage computers I own: 11

Most important ones:
A "modded" Olivetti M4 434 S (currently broken).
An Epson El Plus 386DX running MS-DOS 6.22 (currently broken).
Celeron Coppermine 1.10GHz on an M754LMRTP motherboard