There's a lot around that are industrial boards for backplanes, but there was at least 1 386 upgrade board I saw back in the day, then later Powerleap had a socket 370 system on a board that they said could plug into anything from a 286 upward.

Powerleap Renaissance ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDAyk_IYCDM

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-01, 18:15:

Powerleap Renaissance ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDAyk_IYCDM

you could plug that board into a toaster, add a power supply, keyboard mouse harddrive & screen and you got yourself a working computer 😀

Just don't try to make toast.

but this is just a motherboard with another format, I mean that I need something in terms of virtualization, that I can control with my keyboard and monitor, with a virtual hd (similar to a kvm), just to avoid having to use a bunch of peripherals . (it is to help me with the development of an application for old computers). I thought about using a kvm, but bios kvms are very expensive, and I would still be bothered by having 2 separate hds and having to manually transfer data between them.

I've been using an old notebook with a usb port, but it's tiring having to record my compilations on a pendrive, go to the laptop, copy to it, test, all the time...

PCem requires a computer more powerful than my current Core2Quad, dosbox is not accurate enough, and virtualpc, vmware, are just virtualizers (it's my core2quad on the virtual machine), I need accurate pentium 1 performance to make sure my app will run smoothly on a pentium 1.

weedeewee wrote on 2021-07-01, 18:24:

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-07-01, 18:15:

Powerleap Renaissance ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDAyk_IYCDM

you could plug that board into a toaster, add a power supply, keyboard mouse harddrive & screen and you got yourself a working computer 😀

Just don't try to make toast.

I once fried an egg on a powerbook g4 1.67ghz. At the time I was studying how to improve his cooling. In North America and Europe it shouldn't be a big problem, but here in Brazil they can cause 2nd degree burns, easily reaching 80 degrees Celsius / 176 Fahrenheit. Then I found out that apple had made some mistakes, I made two holes in the bottom housing so that the fans took air, and I manually polished the heatsinks with sandpaper until they turned chrome. The temperature dropped 25 degrees...

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-07-01, 19:03:

weedeewee wrote on 2021-07-01, 18:24:

you could plug that board into a toaster, add a power supply, keyboard mouse harddrive & screen and you got yourself a working computer 😀

Just don't try to make toast.

I once fried an egg on a powerbook g4 1.67ghz. At the time I was studying how to improve his cooling. In North America and Europe it shouldn't be a big problem, but here in Brazil they can cause 2nd degree burns, easily reaching 80 degrees Celsius / 176 Fahrenheit. Then I found out that apple had made some mistakes, I made two holes in the bottom housing so that the fans took air, and I manually polished the heatsinks with sandpaper until they turned chrome. The temperature dropped 25 degrees...

yeah, lapping heatsinks is still a thing these days, especially to a mirror finish. and then there are the people who take it one step further and even start lapping the cpu dies themselves, trying to make it more flat and removing those few nm, µm of material to have better thermal conductivity at the cost of physical stability. Oh well.

I recall having an old board with a 286 onboard, though I never figured out how to use it and must've disposed of it during a cleanup long ago... 🙁
oh yeah, did you try hooking your pentium up to the network and getting your files over to the computer that way ?

Yes, but there are many implications, low security, difficulty maintaining a w98 and w10 network, low transfer speed, 2 machines taking up space (I use a desktop pc on my bed for lack of space, at night I have to disassemble everything to go to sleep)

The kind of cards you think of for personal systems did exist for a few PowerMac in NuBus or PCI format, Sun workstations had PCI addons cards too with emulated storage iirc and in some measure for the Acorn RiscPC (only as a 486 or 5x86 CPU add-on card, audio and video were emulated).

I have a different kind of card for PC but it's like having a complete PC in your machine with its own inputs and outputs, including a 2.5" IDE hdd.

You could give really old versions of VirtualPC or VMware a try.

lolo799 wrote on 2021-07-01, 19:38:

The kind of cards you think of for personal systems did exist for a few PowerMac in NuBus or PCI format, Sun workstations had PCI addons cards too with emulated storage iirc and in some measure for the Acorn RiscPC (only as a 486 or 5x86 CPU add-on card, audio and video were emulated).

I have a different kind of card for PC but it's like having a complete PC in your machine with its own inputs and outputs, including a 2.5" IDE hdd.

You could give really old versions of VirtualPC or VMware a try.

but virtualpc and vmware are not emulators, they are virtualizers, they are almost the same thing as i install win98 directly on my core2quad, they can emulate a sound, video and network card, but they don't emulate a processor.

There isn't anything specifically like that.

What about getting a network card for your old laptop and then set up a share on the newer computer and copy stuff over that way?

What kind of hardware would you need to have adequate speed for PCEM?

lack of space can be very annoying. is bolting the pc to the ceiling an option? or maybe stacking everything against the wall. the network issue doesn't need to be a security issue. There are ways to copy files between your computers that don't require any internet/tcpip enabled software to be used though getting some of them to work on win10 might be a hassle.

oh heck, maybe raise your bed and setup your pc underneath it with a compartment to store the screen, keyboard and mouse.
a 100mbit network card in the pentium would give you better speeds than usb1.1 and no hassle with a dongle.
anyway, it's just a thought.

edit pretty sure that even a 10Mbit network card could easily give more speed than a USB1 dongle.

I'd like to at least control everything with my monitor, keyboard and mouse, but I haven't found a kvm that allows me to use hdmi usb ps2 and vga at a reasonable price (my country's currency is worth 5x less than the dollar)

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-07-01, 20:20:

but virtualpc and vmware are not emulators, they are virtualizers, they are almost the same thing as i install win98 directly on my core2quad, they can emulate a sound, video and network card, but they don't emulate a processor.

The first version of Connectix Virtual PC for x86 host computers was the 4.0 released in 2000 and 1.x Vmware was released in 1999.
I don't recall x86 hardware virtualization being a thing at the time.

convert the hdmi to vga and the usb to ps2 and a cheap vga/ps2 kvm can be used.

lolo799 wrote on 2021-07-01, 21:58:

Rikintosh wrote on 2021-07-01, 20:20:

but virtualpc and vmware are not emulators, they are virtualizers, they are almost the same thing as i install win98 directly on my core2quad, they can emulate a sound, video and network card, but they don't emulate a processor.

The first version of Connectix Virtual PC for x86 host computers was the 4.0 released in 2000 and 1.x Vmware was released in 1999.
I don't recall x86 hardware virtualization being a thing at the time.

They have always been virtualizers. Emulation will always require superior hardware than the one being emulated. And even if it wasn't, it would have a lot of problems to run on windows 10

Virtualization on x86 has been around since unix code was written for x86*

What speed of hardware do you need for PCEM to be fast enough for what you want to do?

lolo799 wrote on 2021-07-01, 19:38:

The kind of cards you think of for personal systems did exist for a few PowerMac in NuBus or PCI format, Sun workstations had PCI addons cards too with emulated storage iirc and in some measure for the Acorn RiscPC (only as a 486 or 5x86 CPU add-on card, audio and video were emulated).

I have a different kind of card for PC but it's like having a complete PC in your machine with its own inputs and outputs, including a 2.5" IDE hdd.

You could give really old versions of VirtualPC or VMware a try.

No. RiscPC x86 co-processor cards use the actual hardware of the RiscPC mobo for video and sound output. As well as keyboard and mouse input.

cyclone3d wrote on 2021-07-02, 01:41:

What speed of hardware do you need for PCEM to be fast enough for what you want to do?

If I may interject, the OP's 13 year-old Intel Core2 Quad, while still perfectly adequate for many modern tasks, has single thread performance that is less than half of a current generation 100 US$ Core I3 CPU according to Passmark
( https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ ). This may not be a reflection of performance under PCEM, but it does give an idea of how far things have come even in this relative stagnant era of CPU IPC progress. This is, of course, assuming that the OP has one of the fastest Core2 Quad CPUs (Qx9650/Q9650/adapted Xeon E5450) .

Admittedly, upgrading to a current generation CPU is more expensive than just the CPU, but it does have fringe benefits as well (a faster PC for day-to-day use).

Of course, I can't say whether this would actually be fast enough for OP's needs .

Intel Core2 Quad Q9650 @ 3.00GHz --> Single Thread Rating: 1288
Intel Core i3-10100F --> Single Thread Rating: 2609
EDIT2 : Intel Core i3-7100 --> Single Thread Rating: 2325

EDIT : Corrected typo

EDIT2 : In post Re: Im making a frontend/manager for win9x games , OP mentions having tried and i3 7100 and having found that it performed at Pentium 75 levels, so an Intel Core i3-10100F would not be much better

If I used VM software to run Red Hat Linux 6.2, OS/2 v4 and a Dos session in XP Pro on a P4 2.4GHz machine with 512megs of ram surely anything faster than that speed should with ease.