Does anyone know if it is possible to pass Virtual Roland Sound Canvas VA through PCem ?

By using Coolsoft MIDIsynth, LoopMIDI, and Falco Midi Player in Windows 10, I am able to use the official Roland VST perfectly with emulators and DOSbox that can output MIDI. Just wondering if I can also use with PCem. I couldn't find anything in the machine setup that suggest I can, but I'm hoping I'm wrong.

Dear Sarah, thank you so much for the incredible effort you poured into PCem over the years, both for the development and maintenance of the software and for offering support in the forum.

I just cannot fathom why people would treat you in such a horrible and ungrateful manner after you've given the community all this for free. As sad as it is to have to shut down a community, I understand your decision to close the PCem forum. Like others, I hope that there will be a way to release an archive of all the non-toxic posts in that forum, for the sake of knowledge preservation. But if it's too depressive to sift through, I completely understand.

Like some others here, I too have only started playing with PCem recently, and what made it so useful was its *accuracy* in emulating specific hardware. It was simply based on a different philosophy than for instance DOSBox, which aims to develop the best possible emulator for running DOS games, without emulating any piece of actually existing hardware in particular. Both approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, and they each serve useful purposes that sometimes overlap, and sometimes don't. That's all good!

Thank you for sharing the code with the world, and best of luck (and fun!) with all of your future endeavours. Stay happy and healthy. 🤗

Perhaps that this has already been suggested by others here, but as a replacement for the PCem forum, perhaps the Vogons moderators can consider giving PCem a dedicated (sub)forum here, just like DOSBox and the various Glide wrappers?

Just to give in my measly 0,02€:

This emulator was completely unknown to me until right now when I was browsing the forum (as you can see I'm a new member).

I totally agree with the notion that we should leave something when it stops being fun and starts to feel like a chore (unless your monthly pay depends on it - then it's called a "job").

Nevertheless thank you for it. I know I'm way late for it, but I'm going to enjoy it.

Best regards!

EDIT: And further reading, I think I understand it was way more than it "becoming a chore". Ungrateful pricks are everywhere, and when you add "misogynistic" and "homophobic" to the cauldron, the recipe gets very depressing.

Dammit. This is why we can't have nice things! Why some jerks have to ruin the whole game for everyone!?

Thank you, Sarah, for this amazing work! It's exactly the emulator i had searched for years and found about 2 years ago.
Get well and find something great to do for yourself. Your contributions to the community through the PCem is already unmeasurable.

Thank you Sarah Walker for your great contributions over the years in creating and enhancing PCem. I feel terribly for the manner in which people have apparently treated and disrespected you. All too often on the internet, the vocal minority have too loud a voice. You are a gifted and talented woman, and I for one would like to thank you and wish you success and happiness.

split off the post by kjiew and the replies to a new thread and put that under review. Sometimes it's just time to shut up especially when you are known to trash talk the project in question.
Please keep on topic. if you want to argue against this moderation, please take it up with the board chief not in this thread.

Thank you Sarah! I'm also using this from time to time in the same manner as flynnsbit mentioned previously - it's not all about games.
Here's a great example:
AMI Color BIOS (1993 and earlier) modification in hex editor

It was pretty clear from the start that this project was about the fun factor. Sarah even plainly refused donations at some point to avoid any possibility of extra stress from that.
So it's great that it lasted as long as it did, hopefully the next "fun project" will be as interesting as this one.

@digger: I guess the plan was always to migrate to github, but that's not a bad idea about having a dedicated section at vogons.
The forums are partially mirrored at archive.org and I'm sure they'd welcome the whole forum archive, at least based on Jason Scott's presentations...(I don't know what the procedure for that would be though).
I recall that you had an interesting first post on the PCem forums about the possibility of using SeaBIOS (or was it coreboot?), did you get any replies about that?
I think they have some pretty advanced tricks in there that emus may not like (cache-as-ram? I would hazard a guess that caches are not emulated, just a hunch though).
Emus generally do cut some corners to gain better speed.

Well there's also the pesky thing about chipsets. You'd need to pick one that is supported by both SeaBIOS and PCem (EDIT: Yes there is such a thing: 440FX. I had no luck with Intel VS440FX though)
So all that in mind it's not so surprising to get a black screen.
EDIT: Apparently it can be done with 440FX! So now what is needed for PCem is Gigabyte GA-686NX (or someone to figure out how it can be done with VS440FX).
The Bochs version of SeaBIOS apparently does away with some things that Bochs doesn't need, so some customization is necessary to get it to run.

To find out the actual spot where SeaBIOS hangs, you'd probably need some way of getting PORT 80 information out.
But that RAM configuration stuff comes up quite early on, so most likely there is no POST code whatsoever.
Btw if anyone's wondering what's so hot about SeaBIOS, for one thing it has a friendly license so it could be helpful for distribution packages.

EDIT: Removed the comment about forks. Anyone interested in that can look them up themselves...

🤫 (whispering ... ) I had deliberately toed the line not to mention any of the forks ... I think you should if you had been lurking the forums prior to the tear-down.

@mr.cat I didn't check in time whether anybody responded. But you're suggestions do make a lot of sense. Just because PCem needs the actual original ROMs of the systems it tries to emulate at the highest possible accuracy, doesn't necessarily mean that the emulation will continue to work the same as the actual hardware in every imaginable obscure corner case. Thanks for responding to it here!

But yeah, a dedicated PCem (or "PCem and derivatives") section/subforum here on Vogons would be nice indeed. 😇

we actually already have PCEm ulation 😉

Pl,ease keep on topic, don't need to to derail the discussion anymore.

Hello Sarah, sorry to hear that PCEM development has come to an end. Thanks for all your hard work and dedication and for creating such a great emulator. Here's wishing you all best for the future in everything you do. 😀

One stupid Question but is it possible to let the emulator connect to the internet when i installed win 98 se in it. Is there a way to pass throug the Host internet to the emulator.

Glurak wrote on 2021-06-27, 00:59:

One stupid Question but is it possible to let the emulator connect to the internet when i installed win 98 se in it. Is there a way to pass throug the Host internet to the emulator.

I've never tried it, but you should define a machine with a network card installed, install the proper drivers on your guest OS and install a network library (winpcap? I remember that there was another one that could be installed) on your host computer.

Yes, it works. It has this slirp and winpcap possibility. With slirp, you just get the internet. With winpcap, you get full local network, including internet.

Thank you Sarah for developing PCem!

Thank you Sarah for give so much fun with PCem over the years. That's the best emulator I ever use.
Wishing you all the best and hope the project isn't definitively dead.

PCem has now been taken over by a new maintainer. I'll let them step up and announce more concrete details when they're ready.

Excellent! All the best going forward Sarah and many thanks for your amazing efforts on PCem 👍

It was a great gesture by you, Sarah, to pass the project on. I have a huge amount of respect for all of the effort that you have put into PCem.

- Alex