86box emulation can play any windows 95/98 game

[Mangoose]

Because no 3D acceleration? The whole point of this is to use that.

Also shit support for Win9x in all VM software, except VirtualPC.

Ah 3d, okay. Yeah, VirtualPC is +1, used it for (what was) buggy ass Chaos Gate. Set auto time interval screenshots and voila... aborted LP.

It's kinda ironic that Microsoft actually gives us nice tools for free. MSE rivals any other free realtime AV (obv use Malwarebytes for scans). Virtual PC.

 

[abnaxus]

Does Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard/Battlespire work with this?

As for Redguard,

No , not properly. I tested it in both 86Box and PCem . Tried both the software and 3DFX versions of the game, and multiple CPU settings for the emulators.

It either crashes the emulator outright, gives CMDFIFO errors and shuts down, or if you can get it run after many tries it runs like a slideshow.

This is with an i7-7700k, 16gb dd4 2400, GTX 1080, Windows 10.

It seems I'll never be able to play Redguard to completion in my lifetime.

 

[Dreed]

It seems I'll never be able to play Redguard to completion in my lifetime.

I managed to finish it without much problems using the Gog version.

 

[ProphetSword]

It seems I'll never be able to play Redguard to completion in my lifetime.

I managed to finish it without much problems using the Gog version.

I was just getting ready to say the same thing. It requires some tweaking if you want it's old school 3D acceleration to play nice with a modern video card, but it can be done.

 

[Bester]

So, long story short, PCem and 86Box aren't very usable yet.

PCem was also abandoned recently as a project. 86Box thrives.

I can't emulate a Pentium II Celeron 300 MHz with my Ryzen 9 3900X (24 CPUs, ~4.0GHz). My host CPU isn't powerful enough.

The best I could get was emulate 100 MHz without significant stutter, but understandably it's not enough for many games of that era, especially if they're of the Win98 era.

TLDR:
But what seems to work for a lot of those games is this: VMWare + WinXP + nGlide

VMWare has 3d acceleration. nGlide will emulate a voodoo video card and uses VMWare's 3d acceleration to display the result.
And WinXP can run a lot of those games either normally or with a Win95 compatibility mode.

(Virtualbox also claims to have 3d acceleration, but this method doesn't work - you get a black screen.)

But some 5-10 years down the road, I expect 86Box to be able to handle everything we need.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

The best I could get was emulate 100 MHz without significant stutter

What? I'm able to recreate my old PC config (Pentium 200 MMX, 32 MB Ram, S3 Virge + Voodoo 2) on Ryzen 5 2600 with full speed and no issues.

A shame PCem died before Voodoo 5 emulation.

 

[Morblot]

PCem was also abandoned recently as a project.

Did the developer join the 41%?

 

[Nano]

I heard the PCem developer had some hissy fit and quit without any prior notice. It's a good piece of software but her personality sounds really offputting.

 

[Morblot]

"her"

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I heard the PCem developer had some hissy fit and quit without any prior notice. It's a good piece of software but her personality sounds really offputting.

I think that was because people uploaded unofficial builds somewhere or another and the author didn't want to deal with issues from that. I don't really understand it myself, beyond the usual bugging free software developers get, but I guess it must have been a problem since there was a pinned thread on the forum about it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I heard the PCem developer had some hissy fit and quit without any prior notice. It's a good piece of software but her personality sounds really offputting.

I think that was because people uploaded unofficial builds somewhere or another and the author didn't want to deal with issues from that. I don't really understand it myself, beyond the usual bugging free software developers get, but I guess it must have been a problem since there was a pinned thread on the forum about it.

you must understand
these people, they aren't emotionally stable

 

[A horse of course]

I heard the PCem developer had some hissy fit and quit without any prior notice. It's a good piece of software but her personality sounds really offputting.

I think that was because people uploaded unofficial builds somewhere or another and the author didn't want to deal with issues from that. I don't really understand it myself, beyond the usual bugging free software developers get, but I guess it must have been a problem since there was a pinned thread on the forum about it.

From what I understand the PCem developer got in a massive slapfight with another emulation dev, with accusations of them harassing each other and all the usual spastic modder/fandev nonsense. To their credit, even if they did quit due to a hissy fit, they were open to someone else picking up where they left off and didn't make a huge scene in public.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I heard the PCem developer had some hissy fit and quit without any prior notice. It's a good piece of software but her personality sounds really offputting.

I think that was because people uploaded unofficial builds somewhere or another and the author didn't want to deal with issues from that. I don't really understand it myself, beyond the usual bugging free software developers get, but I guess it must have been a problem since there was a pinned thread on the forum about it.

From what I understand the PCem developer got in a massive slapfight with another emulation dev, with accusations of them harassing each other and all the usual spastic modder/fandev nonsense. To their credit, even if they did quit due to a hissy fit, they were open to someone else picking up where they left off and didn't make a huge scene in public.

Thank God for the GPL.
There's no way it would take off now with people constantly wanting to police what others do, prevent others from doing something, etc.,
The fact that the GPL is grandfathered into so many projects due to its virality is one of the few things that keeps FOSS alive.

 

[felipepepe]

I got a very specific question: can 86box or PCem run Prelude to Darkness without issues?

I can't make it run on VMware no matter what I do. It actually runs well on Windows 10, but it's impossible to get screenshots or record video... so I was thinking of using 86box or PCem just for that.

 

[Tacgnol]

"her"

What is it with emulation and attracting so many tranny devs?

I swear half the contributors to Dolphin back in the day were trannies.

 

[Morblot]

Trannies prey on autists

 

[Puukko]

Autist trannies prey on autists to turn them into autist trannies who prey on autists to turn them into autist trannies who prey on autists to...

 

[Humanity has risen!]

"her"

What is it with emulation and attracting so many tranny devs?

I swear half the contributors to Dolphin back in the day were trannies.

That's the first thing I thought. No way a woman can program anything remotely complicated.

 

[Don Peste]

ANNOUNCEMENT: MichaelJManley taking over as PCem maintainer
Post by SarahWalker » Sat 18 Dec, 2021 8:08 pm
I'm pleased to announce that MichealJManley is taking over as the maintainer of PCem. While I'll still be around to a degree, Michael will taking over day to day development, and will decide the future direction of the project.

Re: ANNOUNCEMENT: MichaelJManley taking over as PCem maintainer
Post by MichaelJManley » Sat 18 Dec, 2021 10:26 pm
Hello everyone! As Sarah mentioned I will be taking over the development of PCem. Everyone feel free to give any ideas for any future ideas and I will see if they are feasible. I will start going though some refactoring to get it ready for a plugin interface and any bug fixes along the way. I’m excited to start developing and making PCem good for not only retro gaming but even great as a operating system development tool!

 

[Rincewind]

For the record, I gave both 86box and PCem a go last week using the latest versions to run some pre-2000 Windows games (I tested them with Discworld Noir in Win 98 SE, among some other games). In my view, PCem is *vastly* superior when it comes to performance; it's at least 30% faster which makes a huge difference, plus the mouse movement is a *lot* smoother in PCem (in 86Box it was borderline unusable due to the lag and general jumpiness). Furthermore, 86box exhibited some really weird mouse movement issues in fullscreen mode (e.g. in Discworld the mouse pointer kept slowly drifting out of the screen in fullscreen, and it was impossible to get it back).

So, I really see no reason to use 86box for gaming. It might emulate a lot more interesting hardware configurations, but that just doesn't matter when all you're using it for is to play games.

 

[Modron]

IS there even such a thing as running Prelude to Darkness without issues?

I remember playing one of the later 1.3 or early 1.4 versions to completion on my system back then with no problem but yeah without original hardware and a deeper repository of versions to try not really no.

Even back then it was a case of if it ain't broke don't upgrade because it was random which versions would play nicely with your system at least in my experience.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

So, I really see no reason to use 86box for gaming. .

Major PCEM advantage is emulation of Voodoo 3 3000. I can finally play Pył flawlessly and easily on modern rig without weird DosBox builds and settings hell.

 

[Rincewind]

Major PCEM advantage is emulation of Voodoo 3 3000.

You wanted to say 86box, right? Well, if you have a machine with a fast enough single-core performance for 86box, then yeah. In my case, most of the games I tried with my i7 4790k 4.0 GHz were really struggling above Pentium 166 emulation (sound was constantly breaking up, etc). Also depends on what your interests are, e.g. I don't care about action games at all; 90% of the games I play involve some kind of a mouse cursor, and the mouse cursor handling was quite bad in 86box compared to PCem (on my hardware, at least).

In any case, if you need some specific piece of hardware that only 86box can emulate, there's no competition.

 

[Modron]

How old is the game that this is an issue?

Perhaps I must try one of those emulators...

2002 just a smidge younger than the codex.

 

[oddech_wymarlych_swiatow]

86box is finally on Linux!