gerwin wrote:

If I may reply to that question too:
The old HOT-433 BIOS v1.3 is working fine for me: 433AIP16.ROM. With the text mode windowed BIOS user interface.

The later BIOS'es have reboot issues, or do not boot at all.

I have no documentation for the UMC chipset used by the HOT-433, so was forced to guess the shadow BIOS controls (which are required by BIOSes at this point in time). I didn't guess entirely right, which is why very few BIOSes for this board work. This isn't going to change unless someone comes up with a UM8881F datasheet, and to be honest it's not something I'm that concerned about - the AMI BIOS on my site largely works, and there are other boards that can be emulated.

I initially thought it would give the benefit of PCI cards, but all the graphics ROMS work with the 486 VLB systems too.

I was also messing with the 286, which is new for me.
Unfortunately EMM386 does not work and EMM286 takes too much base mem, but there is no other way to get EMS. Maybe an emulated EMS board would fit here.

Regarding the CPU: playing wolfenstein 3D with a SX CPU works fine. But selecting a FPU equipped DX system gives lower framerates, and slightly warped walls.

Not complaining, just having 'fun' with PCem. 😀

Heh, you can load just about any random AMIBIOS and it will boot on this emulator.

To the developer, if you want to emulate the SiS 471 ISA/VESA and 496/497 PCI/ISA/VESA boards, the datasheets are here: SiS 486 Chipset Datasheets

I'm glad the Dogz bug is fixed, though now they tend to flip every few frames or so.

Also Microsoft Plus! installs properly now.

You know what would be awesome? A Linux port. Specifically because my fastest computer only runs Linux.

I said something too soon, Plus! tab in Display Properties cause a rundll32 crash.

Got the Windows Sound System working with another card's drivers 😀

leileilol wrote:

I said something too soon, Plus! tab in Display Properties cause a rundll32 crash.

Fixed!

So just out of curiosity, what causes a problem like that?

Usually for issues in Windows it's bugs with page fault handling, when CPU state is not restored correctly following the faulting instruction. In this case chance stack alignment meant that a far CALL instruction faulted between pushing the return selector and address, and the stack pointer was not restored correctly.

Thanks for the fix!

Past week I compiled the PCem source too. Using Code::Blocks IDE + MinGW compiler + (Allegro) DirectX 9 libraries + attached OpenAL library.
The additional SVN sound and video hardware choices are much appreciated.

Mostly the skill required for understanding the core of this emulator is beyond me. I merely added a windows icon and version info. Then made i430vx ROM use its own nvr file to store its settings, but the i430vx is too unfinished to use anyways, it seems.

Adding "TRIO64 (Ver. 1.5-07) [VGA] (S3 Incorporated).bin" does not trigger any additional video option, the rest works fine. S3 and 'cirrus logic' can actually run PCPbench in VESA mode.

gerwin wrote:

but the i430vx is too unfinished to use anyways, it seems.

There are some missing features, but the i430vx emulation does actually work; I wouldn't have included it if it didn't. What issues are you seeing?

Is it possible to use this 10/10/94 AMI WinBIOS somehow? I get black screen.

SarahWalker wrote:

gerwin wrote:

but the i430vx is too unfinished to use anyways, it seems.

There are some missing features, but the i430vx emulation does actually work; I wouldn't have included it if it didn't. What issues are you seeing?

Looking at the i430VX again, these things come to mind:
-It stores its settings in the hot-433 nvr.
-Keyboard at some bootups not read properly, Then I can enter the bios but cannot navigate there at all.
-It is picky about my 40MB harddisk image, could not find BIOS settings to reliably access it: I settled with configuring it floppy-only.

The CPU choice for this board is rather limited (just IDT Winchip) , but I suppose that is because of PCem CPU emulation in general.

On a side note,
when graphics are fine and smooth, the audio samples have very high latency: they are played like a second after they should play.

leileilol wrote:

Is it possible to use this 10/10/94 AMI WinBIOS somehow? I get black screen.

Only if the UMC chipset emulation is improved. As I mentioned above with regards to the HOT-433 (which uses the same chipset), this is unlikely.

While swapping A: disks in a subfolder within PCem, sometimes the hard drive will just be lost on the next boot and there'll be 0kb hdc.img and hdd.img files in the disks subfolder where I mounted floppies from.

A dumb question... will be there an "official" build for those that doesn't want to compile their own?

Zup wrote:

A dumb question... will be there an "official" build for those that doesn't want to compile their own?

Eventually. The next release is some time away.

SarahWalker, you need these files to add Pentium emulation.

justincase wrote:

SarahWalker, you need these files to add Pentium emulation.

I suspect adding Pentium emulation is not nearly as simple as you think it is, sir.

Perhaps, as above, you could explain why you think Pentium emulation is necessary and why you want it so badly? I do not think it is going to make the emulation any faster. Quite the contrary.

To be fair, some DOS games require a Pentium for one reason or another.