1) The most compatible OS for gaming in PCem is 98 SE. There is no practical reason to emulate 95 or 2000.

2) PCem displays the emulated system speed as a percentage in the title bar (you can also enable the speed history graph). If this number is often falling below 100%, that means your processor is not powerful enough to run it at full speed. Stuttering sound is another sign of that. You should lower the speed of the emulated CPU and your expectations.

3) Your mobile processor is indeed weak. According to benchmarks, the single-threaded rating (the most important one for PCem and 86box) is actually a little lower than my 10 year old quad core desktop at stock speed:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+ … 7+3780U&id=3587
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Inte … +3.40GHz&id=828
You should stick to Pentium 166 mhz MMX or slower.

4) You didn't specify which games are "fine" in hypervisors but don't work in your PCem installation, so there's no specific advice we can give you there. But results will depend on how demanding the game is.

5) The MIDI out device can be selected in the SB16 settings in PCem. By default it's usually set to the MS GS wavetable which isn't great. I prefer to use Virtual MIDI Synth with some nice sound fonts or MT32 emulation via Munt. If you can find out what device your game's music was originally written for then you can figure out what is needed to make it sound right.

Ah ok understood. I’m pretty new to this and for the most part I’m doing everything as I go, I’ll give 98 SE a shot then. That’s pretty disappointing as far as my processor goes, I think Microsoft released the SL3 in 2019 & I know it’s not a gaming laptop but I didn’t think it’d be THAT weak.

As far as games go I’ve only really tried the legacy SRB2 versions; I don’t have/know about a lot of old games but as soon as I was getting problems with sound & SRB2 my attention pretty much went to that instead of trying out anything else. Some versions of legacy SRB2 would work with sound and look decent but for 2000, nothing launched and for 95, Demo 1-4 looked and played terrible, Demo 4.35 wouldn’t load at all. Seems like the early Xmas demos are the only things that perform good at all except for the missing instruments for some of the music.

I don’t know how it’s supposed to sound like (the soundfont) but I just need to make sure all the instruments are playing, I’ll give that a shot and update this comment.

Tye2K wrote on 2024-09-09, 03:58:

I think Microsoft released the SL3 in 2019 & I know it’s not a gaming laptop but I didn’t think it’d be THAT weak.

Well, it's not weak for modern multi-threaded tasks. It's just weak for PCem.

Have you tried these legacy SRB2 versions natively in Windows 10? They might still work.

I see. I’m able to play GTA 4 and 5 (sort of with 5) at a respectable performance so I was confused as to why I was having trouble with PCem.

I know the legacy versions except for Xmas 0.92-94 work on Windows (those versions are DOS only but the Demos do have dos versions) and while I haven’t tried these specific versions on Windows 10 I’m positive they work as intended and perfectly fine on there. I just wanted to see what would and wouldn’t work on a retro OS since I’m only doing this to see whether or not I want to get an actual retro PC and it really just depends on the games I can play.

Hi there! I've used to play SRB2 both on real hardware and in Virtual PC 2004 and 2007 (Win XP host).
Here, I had different VMs using Windows 98, XP and Windows NT 4. SRB2 Final Demo 1.08 ran fine in OpenGL mode back then..

Anyway, I've tried running it in PCem v17 now, because MS Virtual PC 2007 no longer runs on modern Windows.

Here's what I can say so far. Windows 98SE on a Pentium MMX 120 is about good enough for SRB2 Demo 4.35 (Win32 version, DirectDraw).
An emulated Pentium 75 PC might still work, too, I believe. Needs testing..

The host PC is a Mac Pro from 2006, running Windows XP SP3.

I'm doing some more tests..

Tye2K wrote on 2024-09-09, 04:21:

I see. I’m able to play GTA 4 and 5 (sort of with 5) at a respectable performance so I was confused as to why I was having trouble with PCem.

I know the legacy versions except for Xmas 0.92-94 work on Windows (those versions are DOS only but the Demos do have dos versions) and while I haven’t tried these specific versions on Windows 10 I’m positive they work as intended and perfectly fine on there. I just wanted to see what would and wouldn’t work on a retro OS since I’m only doing this to see whether or not I want to get an actual retro PC and it really just depends on the games I can play.

I always have thought that PCEm should be considered a tool for benchmark modern CPUs because emulating real retro hardware is a whole different thing.

Anyway it all depends on what host machine you have to have better performance emulating those retro hardware.

I hope this helps as reference :

My host machine:

MSI Gaming laptop with I9-11980hk (8 core-16 treads)
32 gb ram
Nvidia RTX 3070 mobile 8gb dedicated vram

My emulated hardware:

- Pentium II at 350 mhz
-512 mb RAM
-voodoo 3 3000
- Windows 98SE

Runs good with all the games I throw a it, but if I tried to emulate a higher cpu is were things stars to get slow, and emulation speeds are in average between 70-80%, my point of reference was the famous “can you run Unreal?” 😅 I have a good performance with the 350mz that I’m using now rather than if I emulated any other higher CPU, still don’t hit the 100% with this one but is very playable experience, but for testing purposes i tried this same game with a Celeron 550mhz 🙂‍↕️ and believe performance was awful, choppy sound game was running slow and emulation speeds in 50% most of the time.

So it all depends on your machine and what type of hardware are emulating, that’s why I think that PCEm should be considered a cpu benchmark tool.

It's worth attempting to run it restricted to one core.
It could be a thread concurrency issue.
As far as I am aware those AMDs run different cores at different speeds, which caused me issues in some apps 25 years ago on my mismatched dual Celeron 333/433

myne wrote on 2024-09-19, 04:48:

It's worth attempting to run it restricted to one core.

And kill the performance. The emulation of the CPU is single threaded, not the entire emulated machine, which has other parts like video card, etc.

bosquetor0602 wrote on 2024-09-18, 20:44:

[..] that’s why I think that PCEm should be considered a cpu benchmark tool.

And I sometimes think that emulators should ship with an FAQ these days that explains in child-friendly language what emulation actually is.
Because I'm afraid that too many merely have a vague idea how much effort and computing power is actually required to replicate functionality of a modern, superscalar microprocessor.

They may think that a Pentium PC is old and "simple" and compare it to an original, Z80-powered Gameboy or something.
The dimension of complexity behind the scene seems to be out of their scope, I'm afraid.

By comparison, in the 90s/early 2000s, we still felt how resource hungry emulation was.
Being able to emulate, say, a Genesis/MD at choppy speed felt like an achievement.

That's why I often hope that computer driving licenses like ICDL become mandatory within next few years.
People can use smartphones, but otherwise lack too much base knowledge and technical competency.

In the 1970s-1990s, computers were more than appliances, still. Ordinary users had to remember DOS commands, at least.
That forced them to become familiar with things like filesystems, directory structures and other concepts.

Edit: @bosquetor0602 That wasn't meant as as criticism on you. Sorry if it read like this. 😅

Jo22 wrote on 2024-09-19, 10:03:

And I sometimes think that emulators should ship with an FAQ these days that explains in child-friendly language what emulation […]
Show full quote

bosquetor0602 wrote on 2024-09-18, 20:44:

[..] that’s why I think that PCEm should be considered a cpu benchmark tool.

And I sometimes think that emulators should ship with an FAQ these days that explains in child-friendly language what emulation actually is.
Because I'm afraid that too many merely have a vague idea how much effort and computing power is actually required to replicate functionality of a modern, superscalar microprocessor.

They may think that a Pentium PC is old and "simple" and compare it to an original, Z80-powered Gameboy or something.
The dimension of complexity behind the scene seems to be out of their scope, I'm afraid.

By comparison, in the 90s/early 2000s, we still felt how resource hungry emulation was.
Being able to emulate, say, a Genesis/MD at choppy speed felt like an achievement.

That's why I often hope that computer driving licenses like ICDL become mandatory within next few years.
People can use smartphones, but otherwise lack too much base knowledge and technical competency.

In the 1970s-1990s, computers were more than appliances, still. Ordinary users had to remember DOS commands, at least.
That forced them to become familiar with things like filesystems, directory structures and other concepts.

Edit: @bosquetor0602 That wasn't meant as as criticism on you. Sorry if it read like this. 😅

No worries, I got your point!! 😉 and I agree as well

@tye2k
For win95 I would try a pentium 60 or 90
And would use win98 with pentium ii 233 those should both run pretty stable for a lot of pre millennium games with your laptop spec
If it’s not quite running smooth try a slower processor
I have a laptop from 2010 win7 at worst some win98 games run at 70/75% but a lot of my collection is fine to play