PCem 8.1

I somehow forgot to write about this in the shuffle.  But the fantastic emulator PCem,  has a new website, a new release, new forums, and public software versioning!

So what is new in 8.1?

  • New machines – SiS496/497, 430VX
  • WinChip emulation (including MMX emulation)
  • New graphics cards – S3 Trio64, Trident TGUI9440AGi, ATI VGA Edge-16, ATI VGA Charger, OAK OTI-067, ATI Mach64
  • New sound cards – Adlib Gold, Windows Sound System, SB AWE32
  • Improved GUS emulation
  • MPU-401 emulation (UART mode only) on SB16 and AWE32
  • Fixed DMA bug, floppy drives work properly in Windows 3.x
  • Fixed bug in FXAM – fixes Wolf 3D, Dogz, some other stuff as well
  • Other FPU fixes
  • Fixed serial bugs, mouse no longer disappears in Windows 9x hardware detection
  • Major reorganisation of CPU emulation
  • Direct3D output mode
  • Fullscreen mode

And even better the latest versions allow NTVDM to run on Windows NT (for those who need it..) and a slew of other OS/2 & NT related fixes.

I really like PCem as I can run things like EMM386, and of course running the real BIOS makes it feel all the more real.  The soundcard & video card choices in 8.1 are simply AMAZING.  Just be aware some combinations of video cards & CPUs are incompatible.    So if something isn’t working, it’s probably a CPU/video card combo.  Also I really enjoy Return to Zork on this setup, it feels pretty good!  And the AWE-32 setup for Doom rocks!  I haven’t tried it’s Gravis Ultrasound support yet, but I would imagine it should be comparable to DOSBox at a minimum.  All I find PCem lacking is networking.

You can download my latest binary snapshot here(megaco.nz).  I’ll eventually figure out something better about this later.

Terminator Rampage.

terminator rampage front

Terminator Rampage

Back in October of 1993, this cool looking game, The Terminator Rampage was released.

But sadly I had a lowly 4MB 386sx-16 with CGA, so things like this game with it’s awesome VGA graphics were an impossibility.

Even more sad at the time was that ‘primitive’ 3d games like wolfenstein 3d also required VGA.

But as we all know a few short months later, DOOM was released, and then Terminator Rampage was quickly swept off the face of the earth.

I recently came across this page,  and I thought I’d give it a shot.  The requirements are pretty ‘minimal’:

  • Minimal 386DX-25 with 4MB of Ram, VGA & 18MB of disk space
  •  Recommended 386DX-33 or 486DX-33

So I was thinking Qemu could easily run this game.  Long story short, it doesn’t work.  Turns out Rampage needs EMS.  And for whatever reasons, running emm386.exe on Qemu (I tried a handful of versions) just crash on Qemu after initialization.  Failing with stock Microsoft EMM386, I tried JEMM, which loaded, and ran it’s built in EMS diagnostics OK, but trying to run Rampage resulted in a nice crash.

Qemu crash

Qemu crash

So giving up on Qemu, I tried it on DOSBox.  It runs but it is incredibly jerky.  So I thought I’d try PCem, and see how it runs there.

So the plus side is that PCem, is able to run MS-DOS & EMM386.EXE without issues.  It only took a few minutes to install MS-DOS 5.0 and Rampage on my ‘virtual’ 486DX2/66 with 8MB, of ram, and load up Rampage to be greeted with it’s jerky motion.

Thinking its something with emulation in general I fire up Norton SI to get some PCem scores how it benches against known good samples.

pcem 8.1 386DX33 Norton SI score

386DX-33Mhz 37.4

pcem 8.1 486DX2-66 Norton SI score

486DX/2-66Mhz 136.8

pcem 8.1 WinChip90 Norton SI score

WinChip-90 186

Then comparing the scores to this handy (if not ancient) Norton Si benchmark spread we see:

Pentium 60mhz
=============
IBM Clone               P5/60              256k              187.2
w/ Premiere MB

486 DX2/66mhz
=============
Elitegroup (ECS)       iDX2/66             256k              147.3
SA486P AIO-II
INTEL CDC,SIO&DPU

386 DX 33mhz
=============
Forex 36C100 iDX/33 128k 35.9

Well now that interesting, so at a ‘raw’ CPU level, PCem is delivering on what would be classical performance.  So for the heck of it, I load up DOOM, and it runs a bit choppy on the 386, but flies on the 486 & Winchip emulation.  Now that is strange.  And just to confirm…

Terminator Rampage Box (back)

Terminator Rampage Box (back)

They really thought this would be playable on a 486 @ 33Mhz.

So how does it choke?  While going straight is ‘ok’ turning around is so utterly sluggish that there is no feeling of immersion.  It feels like you are driving an incredibly slow tank.  At the same time, the more realistic sprites, and textures serve to make it look even more unrealistic.

So what am I talking about?

Well here is a screenshot of Wolfenstein 3d on the 386DX-33 (and more than playable).

Wolfenstein 3d

Wolfenstein 3d

As you can see, there is no ceiling, and no floor textures.  The walls are all uniform height, and the textures were clearly drawn by hand, giving it a very fake and ’16bit’ feeling.  I should also add on a capable 286, this game is playable.

Terminator Rampage

Terminator Rampage

Now at first it looks like it has a lot in common with the soon to be release DOOM, with textured ceilings and floors.

Doom

Doom

Now as you can see the difference in DOOM is the 2.5D effect of there being lower areas so you can go up and down stairs (while you cannot go under them).  Also Doom introduces dynamic lighting, and better sound rendering.

While I do like Rampage’s upfront map, as you can see thought, it is very square. In a small effort to ‘speed’ up Rampage you can turn off the ceilings and floors revealing a very Wolf3d like environment.  Unfortunately the more they tried to give the world  detail, the more it well just looks flat.

No ceilings, No floors.

No ceilings, No floors.

Which kind of kills the whole thing.  Maybe they should have left out things like water fountains.

High detail sprites

High detail sprites

Then you get things like this computer setup (one of the programmers? The accountant’s lamp is a nice touch) but it’s a sprite, so as you rotate around it, you always see the same face.

Ironically it’s these high resolution background sprites that make the environment feel less real, as they make the rooms feel too open, and too sparse.

Too open, and yet too sparse

Too open, and yet too sparse

It is the real paradox that in a good shooter you have lots of room, and things to duck behind, but the rooms feel too large, and look bizarre with the massive open spaces.  But it is more so a limitation of the time, with the engine being more of an improved Wolf3d engine, than taking a larger leap into being something more 2.5d or 3d like Doom (or the distant Quake).

Another thing that really bugged me was the doors.

Doom door

Doom door

In doom, the doors felt more ‘natural’ in that they weren’t super wide.

Screen Shot 2014-04-28 at 10.44.09 PM

Generic office door in Rampage

But in rampage they are stretched wide giving the impression of why you can’t turn is you are incredibly wide..

Screen Shot 2014-04-28 at 10.43.16 PM

Rampage ‘exit’ door

Even the ‘exit’ door texture still feels too wide.

I could probably get by the empty spaces, but it takes so long to turn around, and the controls feel so unnatural (they don’t even try to be a Wolf3d control-a-like) that it really feels klunky.  No matter what speed you play it at.

It really was an exercise in frustration.

PCem v8 released!

New features include:

  • New machines – SiS496/497, 430VX
  • WinChip emulation (including MMX emulation)
  • New graphics cards – S3 Trio64, Trident TGUI9440AGi, ATI VGA Edge-16, ATI VGA Charger, OAK OTI-067, ATI Mach64
  • New sound cards – Adlib Gold, Windows Sound System, SB AWE32
  • Improved GUS emulation
  • MPU-401 emulation (UART mode only) on SB16 and AWE32
  • Fixed DMA bug, floppy drives work properly in Windows 3.x
  • Fixed bug in FXAM – fixes Wolf 3D, Dogz, some other stuff as well
  • Other FPU fixes
  • Fixed serial bugs, mouse no longer disappears in Windows 9x hardware detection
  • Major reorganisation of CPU emulation
  • Direct3D output mode
  • Fullscreen mode
  • Various internal changes

pretty cool!

You can find the source code, binaries, and some ROMs on Tom’s Page.  I’ve got to say I really like PCem, it gives the full (slow and painful, like the real thing) retro PC experience!

VIM the Virtual Machine debugger

I stumbled across this site a while back, but could never get it to run.  From the description VIM is:

..(vim) is a debugger, I can’t let a bad program take out the interrupt vectors, DOS, or whatever. Hence the “Virtual” in the name — VIM takes whatever memory it can get, and sets up the interpreter to use a “virtual” processor. So, when the interpreter uses Interrupts, DOS, etc, it’s using the virtual copy, so that a bad program destroying them won’t hurt VIM, the real DOS, real interrupt vectors, etc.

Which is very cool, unlike traditional debuggers which try to hide in memory, VIM executes outside of memory and is then invisible.  Unfortunately it is rather tied to ANCIENT hardware.  And executes better on an 8088/8086/80286 processor.  I thought I could run it on Qemu, but it’ll trap on the BIOS as it’ll have instructions outside of VIM’s understanding.  However using PCem’s 80286 emulation it’ll run fine.

VIM running MS-DOS

VIM running MS-DOS

Another interesting thing about VIM, is that it includes the full source code, which is built with Aztec/C, however it doesn’t build cleanly as you have to finagle some of the assembly.

Running this on PCem is quite nice, as you can set it for a FAST 80286 computer, so it won’t take 10 minutes to boot a virtual copy of MS-DOS.

Is this useful? Well maybe if you feel the need to write an MS-DOS device driver, VIM can debug it.. but otherwise, it is an interesting fossil.

PCem 0.7 and beyond

Checking out that javascript PCe made me want to check out PCem.  And good reason too, as its latest version 0.7 can run OS/2!

At first I tried version 2.0 and it just reboots once it is going to start the installer, (I haven’t tried a pre-installed disk image yet) but for the heck of it I shoved in an OS/2 1.1 boot diskette, and it came up!  So all excited I tried 1.21 and it worked as well!  The caveat is that OS/2 cannot partition or format the disk.  I didn’t try giving it a HPFS volume, but rather setup for a DualBoot with MS-DOS, and that worked fine.

OS/2 1.21 on PCem 0.7

OS/2 1.21 on PCem 0.7

Some of the cool things about PCem is that it runs REAL firmware, so you get the real XT/286/386/486 experience.  Also it is cycle accurate so things are SLOW like they were back in the day.  I’ve noticed that disk IO is really slow.  Again just like it was back then.  Things like DOOM take forever to load on a 386.  Just like the real thing!

If you have the ROMs the CGA/EGA & SVGA emulation is pretty good.   Again this is largely from running the actual firmware.

Work has slowed on PCem, but there is a source repo here.  I haven’t tried to build it yet.

The only thing I’d say is missing is some kind of ethernet adapter.  It would be cool to get this onto the internet.  But at the same time I’ve got to say this is pretty cool, especially if you want to enjoy the PC experience from 20 years ago, this is the way to go!  Although after a few minutes of running a 286 at 6Mhz, you’ll want to push for the fastest 486 it can emulate!

PCEm

So looking around for other IBM PC emulators, I came across this one, PCEm. Now what’s really cool about this one is the old models it can emulate, including the IBM XT, the IBM AT, and it can even run the AMI BIOS for a 286, 386 and 486!

PCem 486

PCem 486

So not only can it run the BIOS but some ‘fun’ stuff like Windows 3.0 & 3.1 in standard mode, (386 enhanced is busted.. )

Setting up Windows 3.1 on EGA

Setting up Windows 3.1 on EGA

I find the 486SX mode works the best… And naturally fastest as it’s cycle accurate emulation. An interesting mode is the IBM 386, which appears to be the IBM AT’s BIOS patched to run on a 386 CPU.

PCem MSD report

PCem MSD report

What is cool though, is the 386 protected mode is complete enough for DOS4G/W executables to run…

Loading DooM!

Loading DooM!

And yes if your CPU is set to low enough Mhz it will take a minute or two to load as it did back in the day…

PCem running DooM

PCem running DooM

And away we go! I should add this is Doom 1.1 shareware, which I did manage to get the sound working on OS/2 2.1, and it’s great to hear that PCEm’s soundblaster emulation works great!

For DOS games, this emulator really has a wide range of machines, and with the actual BIOS it sure gives the original ‘experience’.

*NOTE you’ll need disk images, and lots of them… or some scheme to mount the raw disk image. Also the UI is touchy I’ve already lost one disk to it….