Jo22 wrote on 2025-05-22, 18:30:

Okay, but you didn't respond to my statement about Windows 3.1x.
The 386 Enhanced-Mode seems to work since about DOSBox 0.65, I still had issues with 0.63 - back then I ran Windows with WIN /S.

386 enhanced mode doesn't come close to the complexity of Win95. Plus again, DOSBox is usually configured with enough physical memory to avoid any need for paging.

Some of the custom builds can run certain versions of Windows 95, also.
In my example, it's Windows 95 RTM if memory serves.
The fact that certain versions of Windows 95 do make trouble and some don't so much do let me question stability of Windows 95.

The version makes absolutely no difference. Even Win32s is enough to cause troubles.

Btw, if this was about OS/2 then I would agree that DOSBox is utterly lacking.
But that's another story, OS/2 was a real operating system with lots of sophistication. 😀

Why is it when Win95 exposes flaws in the CPU emulation, you blame it for being hacky but OS/2 is apparently "a real operating system with lots of sophistication"? This is just biased rubbish without any real facts behind it.

jmarsh wrote on 2025-05-22, 18:41:

Some of the custom builds can run certain versions of Windows 95, also.
In my example, it's Windows 95 RTM if memory serves.
The fact that certain versions of Windows 95 do make trouble and some don't so much do let me question stability of Windows 95.

The version makes absolutely no difference. Even Win32s is enough to cause troubles.

No. That's plain wrong here and that's no opinion, I'm sorry.
I've tried several versions of Windows 95 and they all varied in terms of stability (in DOSBox).
Win32s is a very tricky hack using lots of thunking and causes commercial solutions headaches, even.
No comparison to Windows 95, which is easier to satisfy.
In Virtual PC 2004/2007, it requires hardware-assisted virtualization to get Win32s going.
In other virtualization software it can be other way round, I believe.
Speaking under correction here. It's been years I experimented here.

What are you planning to emulate? If simple programs, maybe PCem can be a decent option if looking at performance and compatibility combined.

If you are looking to game, it's usually better to use modern Windows 10/11 unless you want dithering support desperately.

Also I don't see any emulation of EAX.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-05-22, 17:21:

Hi there! A plain PC/AT Model 5170 is quite straightforward to emulate, I think. 80286 level emulation was provided by Insignia' […]
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Hi there! A plain PC/AT Model 5170 is quite straightforward to emulate, I think.
80286 level emulation was provided by Insignia's SoftAT, SoftWindows 1.x and Windows NT 3.x (RISC) for example.

The 80286 platform was very clean and free of most BIOS extensions.
It was good enough already to run Windows 3.1 and most DOS applications.

an 80286 is a good emulator target, from previous PCem experiments that always seemed fine. There is something almost "pure" about that compared to the complexity of later PC's

UselessSoftware wrote on 2025-05-22, 17:21:

A Dreamcast from 1998 had a 200 MHz RISC processor, and the Playstation 2 from 2000 had a 300 MHz RISC.

On the PC side, by the end of the 90's we had 800 MHz Pentium 3's and over 1 GHz in 2000! On top of that, x86 is like the prime example of a CISC CPU which generally makes instruction decoding more complicated and resource-hungry.

Console hardware always lagged far behind the latest and greatest PCs.

CISC does require complex mapping code in an emulator, though RISC may be "simpler" to implement there is a potential for extra cycles per CISC equivalent instruction. Still, the main point indeed is the CPU of 1999 and the associated components in a PC take a lot of emulation to work in concert

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-05-23, 10:47:

Also I don't see any emulation of EAX.

PCem can emulate the AudioPCI. AudioPCI drivers can EAX 1.0.

leileilol wrote on 2025-05-23, 14:53:

BEEN_Nath_58 wrote on 2025-05-23, 10:47:

Also I don't see any emulation of EAX.

PCem can emulate the AudioPCI. AudioPCI drivers can EAX 1.0.

Didn't try it thinking of emulation on top of emulation

leileilol wrote on 2025-05-22, 02:04:

If you really want "performance" there's BoxedWine, because that's platform agnostic and leverages Wine and OpenGL passthrough combined with CPU emulation (A very enhanced DOSbox core emulating Linux for this). It also gets the pesky part of having a Windows 9X installation out of the way....

I'm having mostly issues with BoxedWine:

For example Ignition 1997 (which is great for these tests, as it has a DOS installer/version, a Win installer/version, and a 3dfx patch version, and has multiple resolutions) flat out couldn't be installed with latest official 2021 build, but works with a newer nightly build I found, except for CD music (probably need something like ogg-winmm.dll).
I did have some crashes though.

OTOH I've a game that won't install from installer (the install window is missing all text, and if I wing it by memory, it never installs), tho it did work if I mounted the install directory.
But then I get the error I know is related to wrong registry entries and I've no clue how to fix that.
After that the game has a CD check and nocd was never made, and from what I've read Wine doesn't handle mounted host CD drives as CDROMs, and I don't know how to install a CD emulator in boxedwine.

The whole experience seems like it should be a simple "install to a container, run the game" but it's really not.

The goal of Boxedwine is late 90's and early 2000's games. Its far from perfect, but it does run quite a few games from that time.

I know I haven't made a release in a really long time, but if you want to play with Boxedwine, the current code/build is pretty stable

https://www.boxedwine.org/v/master/build-122.zip

When it comes to performance, I test a lot with Quake 2 and with OpenGL pass through it is pretty fast. In software mode it is possible to get 60fps at 640x480.