quick guess - the video has you setting up a PII-300 and your computer probably isn't fast enough.

GloriousCow wrote on 2025-05-23, 16:17:

quick guess - the video has you setting up a PII-300 and your computer probably isn't fast enough.

That's not his video, it's some other guy's.

But yeah, sound stutter is a symptom of your real CPU not being fast enough to emulate your chosen CPU.
Start with 100 mhz and work your way up until you get stutter.

feda wrote on 2025-05-23, 19:47:

That's not his video, it's some other guy's.

I'm aware. It is an instructional video, therefore you can state it is instructing "you" to do something.

PCem will show percentage on top of the window; it shows emulation speed. Anything below 100% means that emulation cannot be done at full speed. Occasional dips could be tolerated, but consistent values much below 100% show that emulation is too demanding - you should decrease emulate CPU MHz or change CPU type. Different CPU models have different performance for a given MHz - for example, 133MHz 486 = 75MHz Pentium and ~350MHz Pentium = 233MHz Pentium II.
There is a performance table for 86Box (which is based on PCem) so you can check what type of machine your hardware can emulate at full speed: https://www.reddit.com/r/86box/comments/17gax … _what_cpus_you/
Emulation of Voodoo card is also demanding. There is a possibility that even when emulation is at 100%, the game needs faster CPU/graphics - in that case, the game could not be emulated using PCem on that computer.

It's good to start with a Socket 7/Super 7 board as that has quite a range of 5th/6th gen CPU speeds (slowest being winchip 75, fastest being K6-2 300/K6-2+ 550). Pick a game with a lot of self-modifying code (biggest demand to a dynamic recompiler) like a build engine game and dial it down until you see 100%. (Ironically some demanding games like Quake treat the dynarec well and are the best case scenario)