Hello superfury!

I liked the idea of your emulator. But I have some points that if you can improve, to make it better!
- Menu/GUI for windows is very unfriendly, It's not intuitive to open the main menu or change emulator settings.
- README file included with the binary.
- Also I get confused to what file of BIOS to use, I use the BIOS files from PCem, but no lucky.
- What's the main goal of emulator? Emulate a full 80286, all Intel old platforms or other thing?

I'm not a programmer, I played with assembler and C when I was young. If you want, I can help you with the documentation, making the official site, etc...

Regards!

I'm using the latest Generic Turbo XT BIOS v2.5.

The difficult thing about the menu is that I try to keep it the same across platforms(including the PSP, which doesn't support Windows. So I use text surfaces for the menus.).

I'm currently using the bitbucket wiki of the project as the manual instead of a README.

My goal atm is first to get hardware and CPU without errors, then upgrading the CPU to 80286 step by step until 80486 (And eventually be able to run Windows 95/98 games too with good speed).

My latest x86EMU build:

- Fixed VGA Scanline division bug.
- Changed BIOS checksum to a method allowing updates of BIOS versions (from this version on). Older BIOS files are now invalid with the current version.
- Optimized x86 ModR/M processing.
- Fixed .dsk disk image processing errors only reading the first sector of a track.
- Fixed MMU handler allocation. EMS memory is working without problems now.
- Optimized EMS memory mapping.
- Fixed FIFO buffer bug with circular FIFO buffers.
- Added full support for the VGA's Scanline Divide by 2(CRTC Mode Control register), Double Scanning and the Row scan counter. CGA video modes (and any other modes using the CRTC Mode Control bit 0&1) should now work correctly.

My latest x86EMU build:

- Added Disney Sound Source emulation (verified using Wolfenstein 3D).
- Fixed various bugs.
- Converted BIOS MIDI menu to Sound menu.
- Added Sound Source Volume option to the BIOS Sound menu.
- Improved audio thread locks.
- Optimized SDL event polling, DMA handling and VGA Horizontal Retrace handling.
- Improved CPU speed.

My latest x86EMU build:

- Renamed VGA BIOS menu to Video menu.
- Added 4:3 aspect ratio option.
- Applied aspect ratio to all three rendering modes (Automatic, Disabled and Forced modes).
- Added framerate option to the Video menu to enable and disable the display of framerate.
- Moved aspect ratio setting to the Video menu.
- Fixed partial hanging issue due to changing rendering mode in a multithreaded system.

A little update changing the window and display resolution from a maximum of 1024 pixels wide to 800 pixels wide (and 600 pixels high instead of 1024), according to (S)VGA specification.

My latest build:

- Fixed keyboard in MS-DOS text editors during PC XT emulation(80(1)86 CPU emulation). It won't display "`" now anymore for every keypress.

Btw feel free to comment if you want. Any useful input is a good thing.

it would be intressenting to port this to a ARM CPU on bare metal without underlying OS, using SDCard as HD, etc.
Creating a complete XT System (something like MIST.. or ZET CPU)..

Like this:
http://www.fleasystems.com/flea86.html
Emulation on 8051 MCU (8Bit).

But i'm not skilled enough to do this 😀

EDIT:
Looks like i miss some dll files to run this.
VCRUNTIME140.DLL

You need the Visual C++ 2015(community) runtime redistributable in order to run it.

i run on wine -> linux, maybe you could post a linux binary too ?

I also try to get MinGW set up and running, but it won't work installing according to the basic manual, then compiling SDL 1.X (Latest version as far as I can remember). It gives me a lot of compile errors about stuff not being found etc. After that I still need to compile SDL_gfx and then my own app.

Anyone got a good up-to-date tutorial on how to install MinGW+SDL+SDL_gfx on Windows 10?

Also is it possible to build those 3 plus my app for Linux as well while running Windows 10? I don't want to have to install Linux on my HDD: it already is fully partitioned (Impossible to change in one of two pcs I use because of protected recovery partitions on laptop). I can't change the laptop hdd partitions because it contains the factory defaults+software and I don't want to mess with that.

I have wiped up two small scripts for installing MinGW and SDL. They work on my Win 10 PC, so I hope they work for you too.

Unpack into a random directory, and you should have the two main scripts, MinGW-install.cmd and SDL-install.cmd. Both scripts utilities a couple of helper-scripts located in cmd-lib.lib. As long the cmd-lib.lib is located alongside the main scripts it should work. The best way to check that everything is unzipped correctly is to bring up the help-page for the scripts:

MinGW-install /?
SDL-install /?

Let me know if you run into problems.

Now, SDL-gfx - what is that?

I get some errors running the SDL-install:

1Unpacking "SDL-1.2.15.zip" into "C:\MinGW\src".
2'sh' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
3operable program or batch file.
4'sh' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
5operable program or batch file.
6'sh' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
7operable program or batch file.

That indicates one of two things (sh is in C:\MinGW\MSYS\1.0\bin):

1. Something went wrong in MingGW-install. This part:
   
   Appends C:\MinGW\bin and C:\MinGW\MSYS\1.0\bin to the user's system-wide PATH environment variable.
   
   Copy code to clipboard

   1call :xPATH "gcc.exe" "%MINGW_HOME%\bin"
   2call :xPATH "sh.exe"  "%MSYS_HOME%\bin"
   

2. Or you didn't heed the warning:
   
   Please exit this CMD for the changes to take effect.

How does your path look after you lauch a new CMD window?

If you can't be bother to debug what went wrong, simply start a CMD window and look at your PATH. It will be composed of two parts;

1. A lot of paths created/installed by various software packages + a few Microsoft/Windows specific paths.
2. Your local PATH's.

Before the MinGw install I had %UserProfile%\LocalTools on my PATH. For me, the xPATH appending did this (which I could have done from the CMD line);

1C:\> setx PATH %UserProfile%\LocalTools;C:\MinGW\bin;C:\MinGW\MSYS\1.0\bin

Alternatively - my jury is still out on this - you just have to remember to append those two path whenever you want to use MinGW and MSYS:

1C:\> set PATH %PATH%;C:\MinGW\bin;C:\MinGW\MSYS\1.0\bin

I'll test those changes later.

My latest x86EMU build:

- Fixed PS/2 mouse missing IRQ handling.
- Implemented prefetching for all CPUs.

Edit: I've tried your instructions. It now installs correctly (I didn't closed the window when it told me to during installation).

I've tried to call those three commands (sh -c ./configure; sh -c make; sh -c make install) after copying the files from the latest SDL_gfx package to c:\MinGW\src. The configure step ends with a message telling me it failed to run the test program. Also the make and make install say they have nothing to do.

Do you have a similar batch file for SDL_gfx (NOT SDL2_gfx!!!)? I need it if I want to compile my emulator.

My latest x86EMU build:

Changes:
- Increased PC speaker sound response (at the cost of playback rendering) to allow the CPU to effectively change output as fast as it can change the timer.
- BIOS version number has been increased to fix older BIOS settings from effectively giving wrong input (changes in readonly settings becoming more compact in the saved file and memory).
- Fixed stuck emulator callbacks (these could have executed until overwritten).
- Implemented basic BIOS defaults for execution mode(Use BIOS instead of normal execution, since normal execution still has bugs), Aspect ratio, Direct plot(device dependent), B/W monitor, Sound source volume and framerate.
- Fixed emulator INT16/12.
- Fixed boot screen for emulator BIOS.
- Improved CPU prefetching to become more accurate.
- Added an CPU option to select 8-bit data bus (effectively 4-byte prefetch instead of 6-byte prefetch for 8086/8088 and 80186/80188 processor support) instead of 16/32-bit bus.
- Implemented LOCK prefix into the debugger.
- Fixed CPU REP prefixes to work with the new PIQ (and without prefetching at all).
- Improved emulator video interrupt. It's now good enough to be used instead of a VGA BIOS ROM.
- Various optimizations.
- Changed VGA ROM to use VGAROM.BIN and other option ROMs to start at OPTROM.1. If the VGAROM.BIN isn't found, the internal BIOS (based on the Dosbox interrupt 10h handler) is used instead. The OPTROM.1 is now the first BIOS to load AFTER the VGA BIOS (e.g. at C800:0000 using the emulator VGA BIOS). This makes the emulator able to be used without VGA BIOS ROM (which is copyrighted) and usable with only a BIOS ROM (Generic Turbo XT BIOS v2.5) and hard disk ROM (XTIDE Universal BIOS). Thus it's now able to run without illegal BIOS ROMs (for people without a BIOS dumped by themselves).
- Fixed various internal video BIOS errors.
- Fixed disk busy indicators (green text when reading, orange when writing, invisible when doing nothing) when there's no framerate display enabled.
- Fixed VGA crashing when rendering past the available display buffer (800x600 pixels).
- Implemented correct behaviour when the CPU is executing a MOV CS,reg instruction (invalid opcode on 80186+/80188 processors, valid instruction on 8086/8088).
- Added requested interrupt information (little endian) to the debugger bottom row. This makes it easier to view pending hardware requests during debugging.
- Fixed PIT0 still executing while the CPU is paused during debugging.

The current emulator VGA BIOS seems to work in most cases (just as the Dosbox BIOS). The only case I haven't gotten it working yet (of known cases) is when running Windows 3.0 with it's "VGA with Monochrome display" video setting. This currently causes blocky graphics using the emulator VGA BIOS (gives correct output with an actual IBM VGA BIOS).

Also, with the emulator VGA BIOS, the text from after the VGA detection until it starts the harddisk BIOS or tries to boot (it's writing to video page 4 instead of 0(register BH)) gets written to the wrong page. The BIOS still runs and eventually boots, but that part isn't visible (cause is still unknown).

So what's the goal of this project? What does this do that, say, PCem doesn't do?

Well, the current goal is to fix all bugs that are left and get the PSP version working again.

It was originally intended for usage on the PSP(actually still is) as a better usable alternative for Dosbox.

SquallStrife wrote:

So what's the goal of this project? What does this do that, say, PCem doesn't do?

Just because PCem exists and it is a very good product does not mean that all emulator work should stop. Just because it does not do something on top of PCem does not mean it does not have a goal. The point is, it is fun to write an emulator and a challenge, and Superfury's is pretty cool (and complete for a 8086 class computer) so grats to him for writing it. You also get to learn a lot. Sometimes the goal of a project is just to have fun. After all isn't this why we are all on this website? I write an emulator too and the last question I want to answer is "how is yours better than PCem?" It is not PCem, you cannot compare them.

You know, there's been the same sort of "whats the point of dosbox we have virtualbox"

Just ignore those alreadyinventedhere people and carry on 😀