gerwin wrote:

DOSfan1994 wrote:

....it would not be like straight to the point to put Windows on the device since it uses ARM architecture.

This means it uses an emulator to translate DOS x86 instructions to ARM.

There is no comparision to the raspberry Pi 3 because like I wrote before: it is to slow to run Doom (DOS x86) comfortably. Or am I missing something? I am not a Pi 3 user because I prefer x86 and more Speed.

You may be slightly out of touch with recent Pi hardware, Pi 3B has plenty of power to run Doom or Doom II in Dosbox (Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrfAbjnRczM) or rpix86 (Proof: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cb800b5si-8) comfortably.

gerwin wrote:

There is no comparision to the raspberry Pi 3 because like I wrote before: it is to slow to run Doom (DOS x86) comfortably. Or am I missing something? I am not a Pi 3 user because I prefer x86 and more Speed.

My inspection on the video seems to be Chocolate Doom which runs well on the Pi (native port of course) and Yamagi for Quake2 (also a native port). Jill and Keen are DOSBox'd - the poorly configured sound and the smoothed-up 320x200 gives it away.

gerwin wrote:

DOSfan1994 wrote:

....it would not be like straight to the point to put Windows on the device since it uses ARM architecture.

This means it uses an emulator to translate DOS x86 instructions to ARM.

There is no comparision to the raspberry Pi 3 because like I wrote before: it is to slow to run Doom (DOS x86) comfortably. Or am I missing something? I am not a Pi 3 user because I prefer x86 and more Speed.

For facts. Most classic minis use the ARM arcitecture.

DOSfan1994 wrote:

For facts. Most classic minis use the ARM arcitecture.

But these 'Classic Minis' do not try to run 3D DOS games. For some 3D DOS games in 640x480 you need a Pentium II/III at 400 to 600MHz to smoothen them out at 60FPS. This is without any emulation overhead in between, without translating CPU instructions. Compare that to a SNES at around 4 MHz. With SNES emulation you can cut some corners and get things running on light and/or old hardware (but even then purists determined 3GHz is required for accurate SNES emulation).

The question is: Theoretically what speed of emulated x86 PC can a typical ARM CPU emulate at maximum? Assuming one could write the perfect emulator.

leileilol wrote:

gerwin wrote:

There is no comparision to the raspberry Pi 3 because like I wrote before: it is to slow to run Doom (DOS x86) comfortably. Or am I missing something? I am not a Pi 3 user because I prefer x86 and more Speed.

My inspection on the video seems to be Chocolate Doom which runs well on the Pi (native port of course) and Yamagi for Quake2 (also a native port). Jill and Keen are DOSBox'd - the poorly configured sound and the smoothed-up 320x200 gives it away.

That doesn't make sense given appiah4's referenced videos show the DOSBox splash screen and x86pi environment both launching the DPMI extender combined with the fact that chocolate doom doesn't have a DOS port.

Are you suggesting the author mocked up the videos to mislead viewers as to the actual performance of the pi3?

I own a pi3 and use it almost exclusively for DOS gaming and testing. DOSBox running the original Doom binaries on the pi3 provides the same experience as doom on roughly a 33mhz 486.

Native ports of Doom and Quake (ARM-optimized, Linux and SDL) on the pi3 take it to another level at native HD resolution and silky smooth refresh rates, on par with a late-90s nice Voodoo2 setup.

Edit: The pi3's Cortex-A53 processor performs roughly the same number of integer and floating-point instructions per second as a 1.2 GHz Pentium III, 1GHz Athlon T-Bird, or 1.7GHz Pentium 4. But unlike those x86 uni-core systems, the pi3 has four cores making it equivalent to a high end server-class SMP machine of that era).

The ARM also has NEON, a SIMD accelerator, which is on par with the early MMX, SSE and 3DNow implementations. So it's a pretty capable system when you put it in perspective of big-iron from the early 2000s.

krcroft wrote:

That doesn't make sense given appiah4's referenced videos show the DOSBox splash screen and x86pi environment both launching the […]
Show full quote

leileilol wrote:

gerwin wrote:

There is no comparision to the raspberry Pi 3 because like I wrote before: it is to slow to run Doom (DOS x86) comfortably. Or am I missing something? I am not a Pi 3 user because I prefer x86 and more Speed.

My inspection on the video seems to be Chocolate Doom which runs well on the Pi (native port of course) and Yamagi for Quake2 (also a native port). Jill and Keen are DOSBox'd - the poorly configured sound and the smoothed-up 320x200 gives it away.

That doesn't make sense given appiah4's referenced videos show the DOSBox splash screen and x86pi environment both launching the DPMI extender combined with the fact that chocolate doom doesn't have a DOS port.

Are you suggesting the author mocked up the videos to mislead viewers as to the actual performance of the pi3?

I own a pi3 and use it almost exclusively for DOS gaming and testing. DOSBox running the original Doom binaries on the pi3 provides the same experience as doom on roughly a 33mhz 486.

Native ports of Doom and Quake (ARM-optimized, Linux and SDL) on the pi3 take it to another level at native HD resolution and silky smooth refresh rates, on par with a late-90s nice Voodoo2 setup.

Do you think pi3 can do PCem? I am waiting for the emulator I mentioned to have better hardware and a better dynamic reomplier.

If you want to talk about pcem open another thread or better yet post in the official pcem forum but keep the ridiculous questions to a minimum.

krcroft wrote:

own a pi3 and use it almost exclusively for DOS gaming and testing. DOSBox running the original Doom binaries on the pi3 provides the same experience as doom on roughly a 33mhz 486.

That is almosts something. Could you give Timedemo results please (and settings used for the timedemo). DOS Doom runs almost optimal at 35FPS on an i486DX4-100MHz. ARM core-count and RISC processing power don't directly translate into DOS emulation capacities.

DosFreak wrote:

If you want to talk about pcem open another thread or better yet post in the official pcem forum but keep the ridiculous questions to a minimum.

Ok I'll stop...

realnc wrote:

Is it just me, or does this sound kinda dumb 🤣

These "Classic Mini" devices they put out try to appeal to nostalgia, and come in a form that, at least somewhat, resembles the original experience. So given that, what's the point of this one? If it wants to resemble the original experience, it must make you fight with your config.sys, understand why you get "EMS not available" errors, etc. Basically it needs to drop you into a DOS command prompt. If you don't want any of that, then you just use DOSBox yourself, or get games from GOG.com.

I mean, this really does not make any sense to me whatsoever. If you're nostalgic about DOS machines, this thing doesn't cut it. Not even close. So it's not for you. If you're not interested in DOS nostalgia, then this also isn't for you, because you most probably never played any games on DOS to begin with. So who is this for then? I can't see what the audience is 😵

I agree with all your points. I'll also add that for quite a few purchasers of the SNES Classic, or the NES Classic, etc, they already have a perfectly working console which they use regularly, but they will buy the new 'Classic' console because it has an HDMI to TV output, and so it looks better on a modern TV than the real, original console does, since most modern TVs don't give a good picture for low resolution consoles, and modding an old console to add HDMI output can be very expensive, costing a lot more than simply buying a brand new SNES Classic, etc. That reason won't appeal to most PC gamers, as they'll already have a great picture via their PC's monitor, or by the inbuilt HDMI or such PC's hardware.

krcroft wrote:

That doesn't make sense given appiah4's referenced videos show the DOSBox splash screen and x86pi environment both launching the DPMI extender combined with the fact that chocolate doom doesn't have a DOS port.

I was referring to the PC Classic video, addressing the quoted post that was made prior to those videos 🙄

krcroft wrote:

Native ports of Doom and Quake (ARM-optimized, Linux and SDL) on the pi3 take it to another level at native HD resolution and silky smooth refresh rates, on par with a late-90s nice Voodoo2 setup.

Thanks for the Pilightenment but i've already sailed that boat. It's more like a Rage128 - at best.

There is no silky smooth HD. Quakespasm flashes lightmaps and corrupts textures constantly. Playing Quake3 at 1280x720 ("native HD") while staring at q3dm17's black void showed a peak of 30fps (all the while the overheat warning was going off). For at least a year the PI3b even struggled to even run chocolate doom in a 320x200 window (Doom2 timedemo averaged 36fps - note that while doom's native framerate is 35fps, this was supposed to test+measure without one).

Captured these videos right now to show what should be a lower-bound if this Classic Mini is based on something like the RPi3.
- DOSBox running Doom 1.9s timedemo demo3
(2134 gameticks, 2076 realticks)
- Native build of Quake 3
- Native build of Quake

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Ew5WunSPg8cQARX7A

I captured the video at 1080p and 60 fps and they're plagued with moire and color saturation issues. Focus and brightness aren't great either! Sorry. I have new appreciation for the art of hardware video capture.

Gerwin, Leileilol, I've also had my share of frustrations with the pi over the years. It's still a bit of a minefield if you like to tinker, but the latest RetroPie is robust and performant enough if you haven't thrown in the towel yet (I also highly recommend the new A1 class of SD cards, which are latency-constrained for tiny random reads and writes).

gerwin wrote:

DOSfan1994 wrote:

For facts. Most classic minis use the ARM arcitecture.

But these 'Classic Minis' do not try to run 3D DOS games. For some 3D DOS games in 640x480 you need a Pentium II/III at 400 to 600MHz to smoothen them out at 60FPS. This is without any emulation overhead in between, without translating CPU instructions. Compare that to a SNES at around 4 MHz. With SNES emulation you can cut some corners and get things running on light and/or old hardware (but even then purists determined 3GHz is required for accurate SNES emulation).

The question is: Theoretically what speed of emulated x86 PC can a typical ARM CPU emulate at maximum? Assuming one could write the perfect emulator.

For low cost ARM SBCs, emulating a Pentium 400 - 600Mhz system is likely indefinitely out of the league of single theaded emulators. A decade from now we might have a 3GHz RPi5 with 8 or 16 cores, but that still won't be enough serialized speed.

A more realistic route will be to use an x86-based single board computer (such as a high-end NUC) where the instruction emulation is less taxing.

krcroft wrote:

Captured these videos right now to show what should be a lower-bound if this Classic Mini is based on something like the RPi3. […]
Show full quote

Captured these videos right now to show what should be a lower-bound if this Classic Mini is based on something like the RPi3.
- DOSBox running Doom 1.9s timedemo demo3
(2134 gameticks, 2076 realticks)
- Native build of Quake 3
- Native build of Quake

https://photos.app.goo.gl/Ew5WunSPg8cQARX7A

I captured the video at 1080p and 60 fps and they're plagued with moire and color saturation issues. Focus and brightness aren't great either! Sorry. I have new appreciation for the art of hardware video capture.

Gerwin, Leileilol, I've also had my share of frustrations with the pi over the years. It's still a bit of a minefield if you like to tinker, but the latest RetroPie is robust and performant enough if you haven't thrown in the towel yet (I also highly recommend the new A1 class of SD cards, which are latency-constrained for tiny random reads and writes).

Reminds me I need to update my RetroPi.

Also, your mad railgun skillz in Quake 3 had me LOling 😀 No offense

Also, your mad railgun skillz in Quake 3 had me LOling 😀 No offense

Same here actually 😀 Mouse on the carpet, but even still.. majority of that was me! Lol.

krcroft wrote:

Also, your mad railgun skillz in Quake 3 had me LOling 😀 No offense

Same here actually 😀 Mouse on the carpet, but even still.. majority of that was me! Lol.

The most hillarious part of it was that it was on "I Can Win" difficulty 🤣

From their FAQ, this statement implies they are likely using a raspberry pi. I find their "No" answer pretty arrogant though; like only they are capable of adding the winning touches to make an overall successful gaming system.

Well.. all I can say is they had better comply with whatever free software licenses they're using. Their thin layer of python or bash scripts they cobble together will be standing on the shoulders of open source giants in the form of DOSBox, Rasbian, and the game developers who kindly opened their code allowing native ports.

https://unitetechno.com/dt_catalog/pc-classic/

Can’t I just buy a Raspberry Pi, an enclosure, gamepad, keyboard, and mouse, 3D print a faceplate, install Armbian, buy 30+ games, build the source for ARM or install/configure in DOSBox for each and every game, create a menu system with game art, and tell everyone about it at parties?

No.

That "No" is indeed rather offputting. This forum is full of people that have been trying and usually succeeding in running DOS games to their liking.

krcroft wrote:

Captured these videos right now to show what should be a lower-bound if this Classic Mini is based on something like the RPi3.
- DOSBox running Doom 1.9s timedemo demo3
(2134 gameticks, 2076 realticks)

Thanks Kevin for sharing that benchmark!
Matching it up with this list https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/misc/doombench.html
2076 realticks -> 36.0 FPS, comparable to an AMD486-80 or -100.
There will be some additional overhead when sound+music is enabled, but the results are better then I expected.

I also have an ARM device which is an iPad Mini 3. Running PowerDOS emulator and I seem to have the MBF DOS Doom port installed there which is mentioned in my signature. Using the command "MBF.exe -stdvid -nosound -timedemo demo3" I get 26,5 FPS. PowerDOS cycle setting was automatically at 100%. "-Stdvid" is screen size 320x200 with 1 level of green border.

krcroft wrote:

Gerwin, Leileilol, I've also had my share of frustrations with the pi over the years. It's still a bit of a minefield if you like to tinker, but the latest RetroPie is robust and performant enough if you haven't thrown in the towel yet (I also highly recommend the new A1 class of SD cards, which are latency-constrained for tiny random reads and writes).

Yeah, I have nothing against ARM tinkering boards really, and applaud all efforts to improve their hardware and software.

Last year I considered getting an ARM based mini computer, but went for an AMD E-350 Nettop instead. This is now the living room internet-radio. OS is Windows XP/Posready. Sometimes it is running SNES9x, Half-Life 1, StarCraft 1, Wipeout 2097, Flatout 2 or PSX1 emulation. I always try to run such things in HD or windowed, because resolution changes sometimes cause HDMI audio de-sync with the TV-monitor. There is no spare CPU power in the E-350; For some of the mentioned applications to run optimally the radio should not be running in the background. But for what I hoped to run on it, it has not disappointed me at all.
For fun I just booted it up in actual DOS 7: it can play MP3 music with MPXplay 😀

Gerwin, that's a nice nettop you've got!

It looks like the perfect system for playing native late-90s, early-2000s games to bridge the Windows XP/3D gap between the raspberry pi and modern windows systems. I need to look into picking one up.

This is just another retro remake console that will soon end up stored away, maybe only used once by the buyer. The problem with these mini consoles is that they lack several ingredients of the nostalgia experience, that you only get with the real deal. I stick to the originals.