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First post, by videogamer555

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Since DosBox is good for emulating only Dos games, what would you recommend for emulating old PCs in general (like IBM and compatible PCs with 8088,286,386,486, and original Pentium CPUs), with high accuracy, and with realistic speed (not sped up due to the host PC being a multi-gigahertz processor)? VirtualBox, VMware, etc, all are very accurate, but they also are sped up due to the speed of the host PC, so they aren't useful for playing old DOS games.

Reply 1 of 6, by dr_st

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Are you trying to find a "one size fits all" program? Not sure it exists. What is wrong for using an accurate emulator when you need accuracy, and DOSBox to play games?

Never mind that you are confusing emulation with virtualization (VirtualBox, VMware). The latter uses hardware features of the host to define and run the VM. That is why it is so fast.

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Reply 4 of 6, by videogamer555

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dr_st wrote on 2022-01-11, 11:50:

Are you trying to find a "one size fits all" program?

Actually that's exactly what I'm looking for, and here's why. I want to run Windows 95, but Virtualbox (though highly accurate) can't run it. It constantly gives an error, which I've determined through research means the CPU is too fast for Win95. On the other hand, I can use DosBox which can emulate a slow enough CPU, but it isn't an accurate enough to emulate all of the hardware internals of a real PC (as well as all the DOS memory structures) which are required to run Windows 95. As such, both DosBox and VirtualBox fail to run Windows 95. There's a gap in capabilities between DosBox and VirtualBox, which needs to be filled to actually run Windows 95. What currently existing emulator, if any, can fill that gap?

Reply 5 of 6, by Meatball

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videogamer555 wrote on 2022-01-12, 21:36:
dr_st wrote on 2022-01-11, 11:50:

Are you trying to find a "one size fits all" program?

Actually that's exactly what I'm looking for, and here's why. I want to run Windows 95, but Virtualbox (though highly accurate) can't run it. It constantly gives an error, which I've determined through research means the CPU is too fast for Win95. On the other hand, I can use DosBox which can emulate a slow enough CPU, but it isn't an accurate enough to emulate all of the hardware internals of a real PC (as well as all the DOS memory structures) which are required to run Windows 95. As such, both DosBox and VirtualBox fail to run Windows 95. There's a gap in capabilities between DosBox and VirtualBox, which needs to be filled to actually run Windows 95. What currently existing emulator, if any, can fill that gap?

DId you apply the Windows 95 Fast CPU fix?

https://msfn.org/board/topic/141402-windows-9 … u-limit-broken/

Last edited by Snover on 2024-02-15, 21:32. Edited 2 times in total.
Reason: Restoring revision 137351

Reply 6 of 6, by DosFreak

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Don't use virtualbox for 9x. Don't use virtualbox for 9x. Don't use virtualbox for 9x. Don't use virtualbox for 9x. 1,000 times Don't use virtualbox for 9x.

DOSBox is for DOS games.
Use pcem if you care about emulating old hardware and operating systems.
Use qemu or vmware if you care about speed.
For 3D in qemu you'll need an unofficial build, for vmware you'll only have 2D unless you use a D3d/OGL -> GDI/ddraw wrapper.

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