PCem v15 released!

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The new dynamic recompiler appears to be much more faster, although if you want maximum performance, make sure to set your video card to the fastest possible performance.

I was doing my typical DooM thing, and the performance was abysmal. But I did have an 8bit VGA card selected, so what would I really expect? Interestingly enough in ‘low resolution’ mode it performed quite well, but setting it to the artificial ‘fastest PCI/VLB’ speed it was performing just great.

PCem v15 released. Changes from v14 :

  • New machines added – Zenith Data SupersPort, Bull Micral 45, Tulip AT Compact, Amstrad PPC512/640, Packard Bell PB410A, ASUS P/I-P55TVP4, ASUS P/I-P55T2P4, Epox P55-VA, FIC VA-503+
  • New graphics cards added – Image Manager 1024, Sigma Designs Color 400, Trigem Korean VGA
  • Added emulation of AMD K6 family and IDT Winchip 2
  • New CPU recompiler. This provides several optimisations, and the new design allows for greater portability and more scope for optimisation in the future
  • Experimental ARM and ARM64 host support
  • Read-only cassette emulation for IBM PC and PCjr
  • Numerous bug fixes

Thanks to dns2kv2, Greatpsycho, Greg V, John Elliott, Koutakun, leilei, Martin_Riarte, rene, Tale and Tux for contributions towards this release.

As always PCem can be downloaded here:

5 thoughts on “PCem v15 released!”

  1. 86box and PCem are both so similar, yet so different, and there are pros and cons to both. As much as I understand it won’t likely ever happen, I wish the two projects would merge. It’s really annoying from a user perspective.

    That said, I’m glad to see this update. In particular the new video cards (256 colors (!) in Windows 1.x is possible with the Image Manager 1024). It’ll be interesting to take a look at the Bull Micral and Amstrad laptop emulation as well.

  2. I can confirm that 5150 + pcjr cassette emulation works, however it is unclear for me at the moment how to convert .wav pcm tape dumps to its native(?) format. Only some tools got from http://www.seasip.info/ZX could help to create basic tape images from scratch.

    • Google turns up a Java wav2pzx converter. Or you could a converter that outputs in TZX format, and run the result through tzx2pzx. I didn’t implement TZX support directly because PZX covers the same feature set and is a far cleaner file format.

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