Yes.

Personally I'm only interested in era-locked hardware emulation - DOSBox can speed up and slow down to accommodate various software, which is cool for ease of use, but it doesn't emulate a particular CPU, etc.. It would be nice if I could tell it to have an Am5x86-133, and it would lag in Quake, for example. Experience the benefits and downfalls of each CPU, and so on. Perhaps a wider selection of video cards and particular sound cards, though I realize that's far less likely to happen - especially the sound cards - as it requires immense amounts of coding to emulate complex boards like this instead of just getting the software to work accurately, as has already been done.

Bochs and PCem are sort of like that, though personally I never got Bochs to work, and by default, it wants to be a Pentium 4. Ew!

PCem can do from IBM PC to AMI-based 486 40... and emulates the AMI bios for the latter. Now if only it supported the high-end 486 stuff and the funny WinBIOS 😁

I had forgotten about that emulator, I now remember using it to test PC/XT game compatibility at some point in the past. I suppose there's hope for me getting my virtual high-end 486/Pentium emulator at some point after all. 😁

Many older games work best on hardware that comes out half a decade later....as they were pushing the hardware. Playing them on hardware most likely to have been owned by gamers of the day is often an excrutiating excercise.

I am strongly of the opinion that since PC game developers never wrote their software for exactly one hardware configuration that everyone had, you should just use whatever hardware or software solution you happen to have available that gets the job done, and quit worrying about the details. Life is short and there are so many games to play.

Jorpho wrote:

I am strongly of the opinion that since PC game developers never wrote their software for exactly one hardware configuration that everyone had, you should just use whatever hardware or software solution you happen to have available that gets the job done, and quit worrying about the details. Life is short and there are so many games to play.

^Agrees 😉

(not talking about emulators here->)I've been there when it comes to tweaking systems, but nowdays I'm satisfied when a rig runs it's intended programs good enough (meaning very little or no crashes or other annoying problems). What I do like however is to find a use for some typical old hardware, but in the end it's all about the fun for me. Personally I don't like being kept in a box (unless it's my own choice hehe 😜 )

Well, it would be a cool feature for DosBox. 🤣

DOSBOX would have to simulate so many things. You'd have instruction latencies, quirks, accurate memory/cache bandwidth, buses, etc. Eeek. Massive amount of effort for something of dubious value.

I'd rather have the effort put into that Voodoo emulation, personally. 😁

it'd be better for dosbox's video output and opl3 emulation core shoved into qemu or pcem for a more equivelant effect

also don't carry that 'life is short' crap into the marvin forum 😀 I find simulating era-specific machines useful for debugging and testing software. (i.e. a 1995 case wouldn't have DirectX, Xing or OpenGL installed)

That's what Mame targets at, no? But of course you can shove the dosbox video output into qemu, don't see how that helps though.

you know what i mean with the scaling and aspect and

Hm yeah but thought your point was about fixature of a certain emulated feature set, which qemu isn't really capable of afaik.

You can either have "authentic behaviour" (=real hardware) or "authentic usability" (=emulation), not both. That seems to be one of the fundamental rules of emulation, and I don't see it changing anytime soon. A good example is the state of emulation of the famous MOS 6581 C-64 SID chip. The functionality of the chip itself is well known, and SID emulation has been around for many years in various implementations. Yet it's still not possible to reproduce music and sound 1:1 as it would have sounded on hardware. And that's a single, rather primitive chip.

I'm with Jorpho on this one. Just enjoy that little wonder that is emulation. Everything else is just masturbation IMO. What kind of meaning does information like "Quake runs at x FPS on CPU y, but at v FPS on CPU w!" have after all? None at all. Those numbers and tests were relevant when the hardware was around, but they're completely meaningless today.

FYI: I used to own or work with various 8-bit (C-64, Amstrad CPC, Apple IIe) and 16-bit (various Amigas, Atari ST) machines before buying my first PC back in the DOS/Win3.1 days. I always was interested in hardware and how it worked, but today knowing all those details seems like a total waste of time and brainpower to me. Heck, I don't even follow current PC hardware because it keeps changing very quickly anyway, and I'll just buy whatever is hot when I need it. There's more important and interesting things in life.