As a person who had never used a DOS or a pre Windows 2K machine, PCem was my way to do it. It did everything I needed and was awaiting for new features in the future. Quitting this project because of harassment from homophobic people in the Pride month was the worst time.

I hope Sarah puts the forums up because the community needs a lot of tutorials from there. It also remains a question for who continues the project. Can't recall anyone more fit and popular for this than MVG, in case she doesn't continue

SarahWalker wrote on 2021-06-14, 10:12:

I've restored the site - removing it was a knee-jerk reaction and not the most productive thing to do. Forums will remain closed as I no longer believe I have the energy or ability to moderate them. I still don't intend to continue the project, but am open to handing it over if anyone wants to take it on.

thanks, I had a great time with PCem

Thank you so much, PCEm my most favorite project, and most hopes goes for it , its also one of two reasons that i started collecting video cards, and hoping that video cards being emulated.
Its all about 3D Accelerated Games List (Proprietary APIs - No 3DFX/Direct3D)

And forgive me please, i just being one time moron in pcem forums not directly to Sarah and not drectly to PCEm , and regret very badly since than. Forgive me please everyone if i damaged someone directly or indirectly.
Hope Sarah will find new strenth to move forward.

I even dreamed to buy KVM so i can give her direct access to my Retro PC for reverse enginering hardware, if some of developers didnt have.

P.S. I gone depressed =( ,
so sad =(

well.. pcem just needs a few more decades for the computers to be able to emulate voodoo 4 properly 😉

Just want to chime in that I use PCem daily, remember there are folks who are not just "gaming" or expecting "3d acceleration" FTW and must be "the fastest ever!!!". I use it for testing bios roms, different graphics bios, storage options, VHD testing for when moving to FPGA or real hardware. It is a perfect solution for that and I SUPER appreciate Sarah and all she did/does.

I use it for Sierra's PowerChess, which *requires* Windows 9X, by the very way it was designed.

well there is technically still the 86box fork, but i don't know if that will continue too

By chance, I just happened to find PCem yesterday for the first time. I'm looking forward to trying it out, and I do hope someone else picks up the project and runs with it, but I just also wanted to thank Sarah for all the time and effort she's spent so far building it into the resource that it is.

Some of the previous commenters have expressed concern about the loss of tutorials in the forums. Based on what I've been able to infer from the discussion so far, Sarah is justified in not wanting to have anything to do with them again. That said, maybe someone else might be allowed access to that archived content in order to separate the useful technical stuff from the toxic sludge and compile it into supplementary documentation? Considering how green I am at these forums, I wouldn't presume to be entrusted with this. Nonetheless, I've had some archival training and would be willing to help out if asked.

sherman wrote on 2021-06-14, 11:20:

SarahWalker wrote on 2021-06-14, 10:12:

I've restored the site - removing it was a knee-jerk reaction and not the most productive thing to do. Forums will remain closed as I no longer believe I have the energy or ability to moderate them. I still don't intend to continue the project, but am open to handing it over if anyone wants to take it on.

I don't know if phpBB allows this, but would you consider leaving the forum accessible in a read-only mode? There are a lot of guides, hints and some patches that were never added for some reason or another. It would be a shame for all of that content to no longer be available to view.

Even in read-only mode a forum needs to be maintained so as to not leak data in future forum software breaches. I wouldn't want to burden myself with this.

i guess if the data (email/pass) could be removed. It is not needed for reading anyway.

Thank you Sarah! All of your work over the years is massively appreciated.

I only found out about PCem today. I'm a retro freak and I am very impressed by the quality of your work Sarah. So thank you for developing this amazing piece of software. Please reconsider returning to the project as it's really one of a kind. We greatly appreciate you and your work.

Indeed, your work is far more than impressive, Sarah. I hope that all goes well with your future endeavors, no matter what those might be.

- Alex

That's a heck of a lot of useful information to nuke. Not to mention the mass exodus to here. There must be an archiving solution to this if maintaining a forum really is as taxing as it sounds; the Wayback Machine doesn't have much saved at all.

EDIT: I realise that wasn't the most constructive comment so I've found a guide to archiving a board using HTTrack although I expect it would involve restoring things to how they were albeit as read-only until the mirror is complete. No idea if this still works although I am familiar with the software in question. Development of it stopped in 2017. 😒

How to archive a pbpbb board free of charge:

1. Download HTTrack.
2. Log into your admin control panel on phpbb and create a new bot with the User Agent of 'HTTrack'.
3. Go to the permissions section and set the bot permissions to be able to see user profiles (if you want these archiving too).
4. Load up HTTrack, make a new project, enter the url of your board, hit go.
5. This could take a very long time so just leave it overnight - with my awful internet connection it took around 6 hours for a board with 26,000 posts.
6. Make a new git repo in the same director as HTTrack downloaded all the files to and push to the master repo (your new GitHub repo) (guide).
7. Set the GitHub repo to have a github.io page (guide > Project site > Start from scratch).
8. You can set a custom domain if you want but you also don't have to.

I just found PCem maybe a month ago - I hope it doesn't die.

Thank you for the work you've done Sarah; PCem is by far the best emulator I've ever seen.

PCem always provides (provided?) a good alternative to VMs like VMware or Virtualbox as it does not suffer from the lack of CPU features like broken VME on Ryzen machines....

It's a shame that people won't stop offending such great spirits behind PCem, until the whole project is dead...

Completely understandable, even if it is indeed sad news. If you're not having fun with a project, then it is time to call it a day. Even without continuation, PCem still accomplishes so much in its current state and will be useful for many years.

Would it be possible to keep the forums locked, but still viewable, though ? - It's handy to read up on old posts if needing some help with an issue.

Take care, Sarah

Thanks for all the work done Sarah, i've used extensively PCem for the FastDoom project as It's much better than DosBox, and supports hardware that I don't have. It's really an incredible piece of software.

sherman wrote on 2021-06-14, 07:35:

As of writing this post, the canonical GitHub repo at https://github.com/sarah-walker-pcem/pcem still exists.

That was a pretty strong language, wasn't it? Or am I getting old & rusty in my command of English language? Oh, please, this is not episodes of novel or popular franchised of Sci-Fi fiction storylines. It's a GPL'ed freebie PC emulator that everyone loves. Anyone who has the snapshot of the source code is free to revive the project anywhere one sees fit in compliance with GPL.

For the author of PCem, there isn't really anything to hand over in term of PCem development. General practice is to archive the GitHub repo so that issues and feature/merge requests will stop. Be well, and enjoy the wonderful world.

kjliew wrote on 2021-06-14, 00:08:

As long as the author did not take things personal and out to destroy every traces of PCem source code, anyone with the right motivation could always revive the project in the future.

As wished, I was wrong about that. So I Google up "what happens to forks when master was deleted". The author is free to purge the repo to help GitHub hosting save some penny on disk cost. One of the forks will be promoted to master and all issues, feature/merge requests will go to the new master. There are plenty of forks at time of writing this post, so everything is good.

kjliew wrote on 2021-06-18, 19:40:

sherman wrote on 2021-06-14, 07:35:

As of writing this post, the canonical GitHub repo at https://github.com/sarah-walker-pcem/pcem still exists.

That was a pretty strong language, wasn't it? Or am I getting old & rusty in my command of English language? Oh, please, this is not episodes of novel or popular franchised of Sci-Fi fiction storylines. It's a GPL'ed freebie PC emulator that everyone loves. Anyone who has the snapshot of the source code is free to revive the project anywhere one sees fit in compliance with GPL.

Slightly poor word choice there upon reflection. Official would probably be the better word.

EDIT: Just removed the word entirely from the original post.