InsideQC Forums

I wonder if anyone else has used PCem yet.

It just gained FPU and AM5x86 support, so if you ever wanted to try Quake on (simulated) 486 hardware the lazy way without having to build a whole 486, you can.

Be aware you'll need a very powerful computer to emulate the later 486 CPUs, and by powerful I mean 3ghz+ AMD or Core isomething

This isn't really a subsitute for DOSBox, but it's one of the only x86 emulators I know with a choice for a target CPU and BIOS (yes, it emulates the BIOS as well, and it can also have the option to simulate the speed of the ISA bus)

It also can run Windows 95 which DOSBox can't support.

Hadn't heard of it until now, so I downloaded it and installed with the AMI win95 BIOS. It booted up after the 3rd try with some BIOS setting fiddling, that's as far as I got so far. It's not capturing the mouse at this point. If it would run DOS Quake and djgpp it's a winner. Because it actually emulates at the BIOS level it sounds promising.

I've been trying to get djgpp to compile Quake in a DOS emu box. So far it crashes in DOSbox, and I haven't figured out how to add files to VMbox. VMbox will let me attach a virtual CD, for example, but it won't read the iso.

DOSbox will run Quake in VM window or multiple fullscreen modes including 320x200 (via 2x stretching).

2011 was a sad year for Win95/98/DOS machines in my house . 486 EGA Thinkpad died and also a PII laptop. Now just virtual DOS on Win7 64bit.

virtualbox has come quite far so id recomend that hell its the only one of the virtual machines that can run OS/2
dos works fine also.
If you need help setting it up id be glad to lend a hand, i been using it quite a while.

reckless wrote:If you need help setting it up id be glad to lend a hand, i been using it quite a while.

Thanks! What's a good way to get files from the "real world" onto the virtual DOS drive? I failed with a CD iso, but maybe it was the wrong format.

...OK, I've got the vbox CD working now. I had been using a beta DOS with networking, but the beta didn't recognize it.

networking can be a bitch to setup on dos use an old recognized card as the emulation target like the ne2000
freedos also has networking but is equally hard to get working if you use a network card to recent. As for moving files from windows to dos make a floppy image and mount it then cd to A: and copy from there.

dos needs aspi drivers before you can access a cdrom drive hence my suggestion about floppy images
if i remember correctly you can copy of the aspi driver from a win98 boot diskette but you need to edit a few files if i remember correctly. autoexec.bat and config.sys i think.
you can edit these from inside dos by typing edit C:\autoexec.bat etc. Another way that might be easier is installing dos 6.2 and then upgrading it with win95 that way you get both cdrom access
and networking + you can run both dos and windows programs.

is 'emulating the amibios' in that list of features?

reckless wrote:virtualbox has come quite far so id recomend that hell its the only one of the virtual machines that can run OS/2

Woah, now THAT'S impressive, because OS/2 kernel requires emulation of an obscure 286 instruction to run.

not sure about amibios but it could probably be added from another emu.

And yup its impressive that it runs OS2 i tried litterally every possible emu including commercial ones and none of them would run it only virtualbox
Even more funny it runs OS2 better than my old vectra vli8 which hp made drivers for OS2 rofl.

New version 0.7 just came out 2 days ago. It compiles in Mingw too
Unfortunately it may be the last release
-march=amdfam10 doesn't do much for speeding up

V9's out and it adds S3 ViRGE emulation - and yes that means its infamous 3d chip too.

also a linux version

revelator wrote:virtualbox has come quite far so id recomend that [...]
If you need help setting it up id be glad to lend a hand, i been using it quite a while.

I used to use VirtualBox over five years ago on an old desktop PC, but now it simply will not start any VM on my new laptop, which is a Dell Inspiron N5110 running Windows 7 x64. The "Creating process" bar never increases, and it makes the whole host machine become unstable, refusing to shutdown.

If there's an old version that should work, I'll try it.

either way Virtualbox sucks because it doesn't have any display driver to use with W9x guests. PCem on the other hand has a crapload of options

A screenshot of the ViRGE emulation running Q3 via a D3D wrapper with the filtering off

(and yes q3 can run on a 486 processor upping the cache definitely helps)

Thanks, I'll try it.

What I want is to use old tools like AdQuedit (which doesn't run properly on anything newer than XP) and to install a Linux distro.