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:

From the post on the freebasic.net/forum.

Some time ago I raised a challenge: make a PC emulator 80486 in Basic !!!

To achieve this, I used a very old version of PCEM, with the help of “FreeBasic”, starting from PCEM-V4.1, about six months ago, I managed to make it work, in 80286 mode only. Then I went little by little adding functionalities of the following versions, until arriving at the V8 (not completely, but if great part). Due to the complexity and lack of speed in BASIC, I have only converted the modules that have interested me the most, eliminating many unnecessary ones, so I have managed to reach an 80486-DX2-66mhz with FPU, 16mb of RAM and VGA TSENG of 2mb.
I have removed many non-necessary modules, such as the sound (it does not have any sound), the LPT port, the PS2 port, the FDC unit and more.
It has many faults, but in general they work VERY well, and it is capable of running “WINDOWS 3.11”, “Deluxe Paint”, “Wolfstein 3D” and many other programs. 
It can reach a resolution of 800×600 to 16 colors, but it moves better in 640×480 16 colors.
The keyboard fails, all the keys do not work, and neither EMM386.EXE nor EXPANDED memory can be used, because it fails and becomes very slow.
It works in both protected mode and real mode, but when entering protected mode, the PC becomes slow.

It’s slow, but yes, it runs!

It only has one config hard coded, as jepalza ported enough of it for this one config. Oddly enough it’s my least favorite the ‘winbios’ 486.

I have to say this is pretty cool!

As always, here is my mirror (usual 404 page reading required) here: PCEM_FB486.rar

Installing

Text mode is all the same setup wise, but on reboot the installer goes forward in glorious CGA ‘high res’ mode.  Which is pretty terrible.

Welcome to OS/2!

Yuck.  I guess at the time I just felt lucky that I could at least run it.  Although once I got lucky enough to score an EGA card + monitor.  Anyways let’s continue the horror!

Command prompt

Yep, there is the desktop! .. barely.  The desktop constantly want’s to jump around which is annoying, just as command prompt’s cant decide if they should be black or white.  And the font’s get truncated.  It’s almost as if nobody cared about actually supporting CGA.  Which honestly I’m more surprised that it even made the cut.

Word and the fox

Sure, I could have changed the default font, but why should I?  I know Word 1.1 is very primitive but wow.

To be fair, Windows in CGA is pretty terrible as well.

Could they make the title bar any larger?

Not to mention solitaire on both is nearly impossible between the lack of colour, and the lack of any high resolution.  I suppose the Wyse 700 display ought to be much nicer, if only they had gone through the hell of making OS/2 device drivers.

One neat ‘feature’ of PCem is that it’s CGA emulates the single ported memory, so that the card & host cannot properly share the video memory so for programs not watching the retrace line you get the snow effect. (here is a demo, GP-01 by Genesis Project with snow, and here without snow).

but of course in this day & age all of this really is moot.

New systems like:

• IBM PS/2 Model 50
• IBM PS/2 Model 55SX
• IBM PS/2 Model 80

New disk controllers!

• AT Fixed Disk Adapter
• DTC 5150X
• Fixed Disk Adapter (Xebec)
• IBM ESDI Fixed Disk Controller
• Western Digital WD1007V-SE1
• Adaptec AHA-1542C
• BusLogic BT-545S
• Longshine LCS-6821N
• Rancho RT1000B
• Trantor T130B

And plenty of new fixes!  I just installed Citrix 2.0 with the older OS/2 1.2 based drivers, and it works great!

Citrix 2.0 on PCem v13

The full announcement is here, along with downloads for Windows & Linux.

But thanks to emulation we can re-live the pain!

I setup emulation for an Intel Advanced/EV board, with an Intel Pentium Overdrive CPU at 166Mhz (my machine can handle that easily with the new builds!), 32MB of RAM, and a Phoenix S3 Trio32 video card set as Fast VLB/PCI.  After that toogle Voodoo Graphics, set the card model to the Voodoo2 , and bump up the RAM to 4MB, because we live in the future!

Also I should mention, that much like real hardware, it is best to go into the BIOS (F1 to enter BIOS setup) and make some changes, disable the built in audio card, serial and parallel ports.

And make sure the board is set to use the ICU with Windows 95 Plug & Play support.

To go from old, I installed Windows 95 from virtual floppies.  Its the oldest/smallest retail version of Windows 95, so I know if it’ll work here, it’ll work on much newer versions.

For me the S3 card is picked up by Windows on it’s own.  Now for the fun with better graphics.  As a test I’m using Wipeout 2097 / XL for the PC.  Although the game comes with Direct X version 3, I have found that the video emulation has major issues with the updated Direct X v3 drivers.  I did find that the Direct X 7a drivers work fine, along with the last reference  driver for Windows 9x.  Now I know you’ll want to know where to find ancient software like this, and it’s all on this great site falconfly.de

In my case, I found it easier to install Direct X 7, then expand the Voodoo driver, and in the hardware manager, find the ‘unknown’ device, and point it to the voodoo driver, reboot and you should be now set!

You can verify the installation by running dxdiag

3dfxV2.drv

One thing of note, is that all 3D accelerated options are “full screen”.  Which I don’t think really matters as by default PCem runs in a window.  If you are multitasking odds are you aren’t trying to multitask with Windows 95….

Wipeout XL

And I have to say, it looks GREAT!

• New machines added – AMI 386DX, MR 386DX
• New graphics cards – Plantronics ColorPlus, Wyse WY-700, Obsidian SB50, Voodoo 2
• CPU optimisations – up to 50% speedup seen
• 3DFX optimisations
• Improved joystick emulation – analogue joystick up to 8 buttons, CH Flightstick Pro, ThrustMaster FCS, SideWinder pad(s)
• Mouse can be selected between serial, PS/2, and IntelliMouse
• Basic 286/386 prefetch emulation – 286 & 386 performance much closer to real systems
• Improved CGA/PCjr/Tandy composite emulation
• Various bug fixes

Thanks to Battler, leilei, John Elliott, Mahod, basic2004 and ecksemmess for contributions towards this release.

http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/

via SLiRP

injecting networking was no more difficult than it was in version 10.  It’s only a few changes to pc.c, if you look at the USENETWORKING define you’ll see them.  The best notes are on the forum.

I haven’t changed or improved anything it still requires manual configuration.

Downloads are available on my site as pcem_v11_networking.7z.  You’ll have to defeat the password protection, as always.  I included the source, it ought to be trivial to rebuild.

*For anyone using an old version the ‘nvr’ directory is missing, so PC-em is unable to create new non volatile ram save files, meaning you always loose your BIOS settings.  Sorry I missed that one.

PCem v11 released. Changes from v10.1 :

• New machines added – Tandy 1000HX, Tandy 1000SL/2, Award 286 clone, IBM PS/1 model 2121
• New graphics card – Hercules InColor
• 3DFX recompiler – 2-4x speedup over previous emulation
• Added Cyrix 6×86 emulation
• Some optimisations to dynamic recompiler – typically around 10-15% improvement over v10, more when MMX used
• Fixed broken 8088/8086 timing
• Fixes to Mach64 and ViRGE 2D blitters
• XT machines can now have less than 640kb RAM
• Added IBM PS/1 audio card emulation
• Added Adlib Gold surround module emulation
• Fixes to PCjr/Tandy PSG emulation
• GUS now in stereo
• Numerous FDC changes – more drive types, FIFO emulation, better support of XDF images, better FDI support
• CD-ROM changes – CD-ROM IDE channel now configurable, improved disc change handling, better volume control support
• Now directly supports .ISO format for CD-ROM emulation
• Fixed crash when using Direct3D output on Intel HD graphics
• Various other fixes

Thanks to Battler, SA1988, leilei, Greatpsycho, John Elliott, RichardG867, ecksemmess and cooprocks123e for contributions towards this release.

Downloads are available for Windows & Linux.

• New machines – AMI XT clone, DTK XT clone, VTech Laser Turbo XT, VTech Laser XT3, Phoenix XT clone, Juko XT clone, IBM PS/1 model 2011, Compaq Deskpro 386, DTK 386SX clone, Phoenix 386 clone, Intel Premiere/PCI, Intel Advanced/EV
• New graphics cards – IBM VGA, 3DFX Voodoo Graphics
• Experimental dynamic recompiler – up to 3x speedup
• Pentium and Pentium MMX emulation
• CPU fixes – fixed issues in Unreal, Half-Life, Final Fantasy VII, Little Big Adventure 2, Windows 9x setup, Coherent, BeOS and others
• Improved FDC emulation – more accurate, supports FDI images, supports 1.2MB 5.25″ floppy drive emulation, supports write protect correctly
• Internal timer improvements, fixes sound in some games (eg Lion King)
• Added support for up to 4 IDE hard drives
• MIDI OUT code now handles sysex commands correctly
• CD-ROM code now no longer crashes Windows 9x when CD-ROM drive empty
• Fixes to ViRGE, S3 Vision series, ATI Mach64 and OAK OTI-067 cards
• Various other fixes/changes

Official download links:

PCem v10 for Windows
PCem v10 for Linux

I personally prefer PCem over DOSBox at the moment, as PCem runs the actual BIOS code, so it feels more like an actual vintage PC.  PCem does need a significantly more powerful machine to push it thought.

I haven’t heard anything too wrong with my stuff, so no changes.

Build is located here: PCem-build-347-pcap-slirp.7z

One nice change is that IDE devices are reset between reboots, so us 386 and 486 fans (probably others) can now reboot and actually boot.