
PCem – An emulator for various old PCs - vmorgulis
http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/
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throwaway7767
Really hope PCem gets network support at some point. There was a branch
implementing ne2k support but it's old and didn't apply to master cleanly last
I checked. Setting up an OS on it was a bit of a pain in the ass, the only way
to transfer files was to create ISOs with them and mount them in the emulator.

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ilaksh
Whats the point of emulating all of these variants? Aren't they all similar
enough that you can run the software with just one particular machine emulated
and it would work almost identically? I thought that was the whole point of
the PC.

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rpiguy
Your statement mostly applies to the AT/286 era and beyond. Very early PCs
were not clones but rather MS DOS compatible which is different (BIOS was not
compatible). Even when true clones appeared with compatible BIOS system
designers like Tandy would try to innovate with things like "Tandy Graphics
and Sound" which are sort of PC Jr graphics but not quite, etc. Having the
ability to emulate the older machines is a boon to gamers.

However, I have no idea why anyone would want to emulate Cyrix chips or later
PCs other than out of curiosity. A lot on this list does seem superfluous.

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IntelMiner
>However, I have no idea why anyone would want to emulate Cyrix chips or later
PCs other than out of curiosity. A lot on this list does seem superfluous.

Gaming, mostly. A lot of computer games from back then simply will not run on
modern machines. Even after things fell into place with DirectX/OpenGL,
Windows is such a complex system that keeping all those millions of plates
spinning at once is simply impossible

There's games today that I can't run from the last 15 years alone, like
Westwood Studios Command & Conquer series. The company is defunct, and the
buyer (EA) lost the source code over a decade ago, if you believe the rumors.
There's simply no other way to RUN the game past Windows 7 (EA no longer
bothers patching it to work on newer systems with their re-releases)

The only alternative is really to simply buy the older hardware, which is
becoming increasingly scarce and difficult to maintain (why would we keep
these 30 year old Video card drivers says someone at AMD, before rm -rf'ing
them off the FTP for instance?)

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nix0n
I have had luck with non-game 16-bit programs in Wine, you can look programs
up in the Wine database to see if they work:
[https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iI...](https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=910)

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dancek
The sources for the emulated devices are very interesting to read. E.g.
[https://bitbucket.org/pcem_emulator/pcem/src/c3548dff8c8b235...](https://bitbucket.org/pcem_emulator/pcem/src/c3548dff8c8b235bde952201154a8eb340613272/src/vid_s3.c?at=default&fileviewer=file-
view-default)

I imagine the emulations are based on some public docs or existing driver
implementations, and probably not completely accurate--but accurate enough to
work with some (most?) drivers. Emulating a lot of old hardware at that level
is impressive.

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smegel
Wonder if this will replace DOSBox which is derelict.

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voltagex_
I don't think DOSBox is "derelict".

[http://source.dosbox.com/dosboxsvn.txt](http://source.dosbox.com/dosboxsvn.txt)

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richard_todd
It might not be, but it's easy to understand why a casual observer would think
so. The latest news on the dosbox website is from 2013, and the latest version
(0.74) was released in 2010 according to the date on the sourceforge download
page.

I wonder why they have not made another official release?

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voltagex_
Interestingly, GOG (Good Old Games) are quite happy to ship 0.74 (including
wasting 1.5 megabytes of space in most games by shipping the source) with
their commercial games - even the latest one 11 days ago (yes, I bought it
just to check!)

[https://www.gog.com/forum/general/whats_the_latest_dosbox_ba...](https://www.gog.com/forum/general/whats_the_latest_dosbox_based_game_released_on_gog)

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detaro
the "wasted" 1.5 MB probably are the simplest way for them to be sure to be
GPL compliant.

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voltagex_
True, but wouldn't they be compliant pointing to
[http://gog.com/dosbox](http://gog.com/dosbox) as well?

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detaro
I think that would work just as well and would have been my first idea too,
but IMHO it's kind of an elegant solution to do it this way. The recipient can
very easily find the exact version used and they don't have to maintain that
information somewhere else. Especially if they add specific patches -> I know
that they often modify the game binaries, but maybe they have custom DOSbox
changes as well.

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gcb0
what is this? qemu?

site nor repo has any description or faq

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voltagex_
Nope, appears to be a completely different emulator. Looks to have been
initially Windows only, although there's a version for Linux now.

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Narishma
There's a Linux version but it is pretty much unmaintained. It receives the
occasional update but it's slower than the Windows version, has less features
and the UI is terrible.

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gcb0
alrigth then. let's fire up virtual box with a Windows image to check this out
:D

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mycall
I wonder if it includes the BASIC ROM chip.

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Narishma
It doesn't. You have to provide the ROM files yourself.

