doshea wrote on 2023-04-22, 03:22:
songoffall wrote on 2023-04-11, 23:41:
As for my target machine, I need the exact BIOS - to test which SoftPaqs would work for my particular machine, for example. I think it's a missed opportunity, because one could build their entire HDD on the VM and just deploy it on a CF, place it in the real hardware where it would just work 😀) but well, if it can't be done, so be it.
That would be nice! Unfortunately you'd probably need a fairly accurate emulation of your machine and all of its devices to be able to test that in a useful way, and there are so many machines that have existed with so many different devices, each of which requires at least a little work to emulate, sometimes a lot of work. For those of us who don't have the knowledge and/or time to write our own emulation, we just have to hope that someone who does happens to be interested enough in our particular model to emulate it!
yeah, but with PCEMU/86BOX you could essentially make a custom PC build, except for the base computer/hardware identifiers/BIOS itself. Two Pentium II computers aren't that different from each other in the sense that you didn't have so much hardware integrated in the chipset as you do now. The other devices would sit on the PCI/ISA buses, so in my case you'd need the Compaq ROM, an IDE adapter and a Matrox MGA Mystique onboard graphics on PCI, PS/2, COM, LPT, USB 1.0 controllers and that's it, pretty standard stuff. At least that's how I see it.
Compaq Deskpro 2000/P2 300MHz/384Mb SDRAM/ESS ES1868F/Aureal Vortex 2
Asus A7N8X-VM400/AMD Athlon XP 2ooo+/512Mb DDR DRAM/GeForce 4 MX440/Creative Audigy 2
Asus P5Q Pro/Core2 Quad Q9400/2Gb DDR2/GeForce 8800GT/Creative X-Fi