PCem on OSX anytime soon?

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athlonxp
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PCem on OSX anytime soon?

Post by athlonxp »

I have tried PCem emulator recently. It is great to control what hardware is being emulated, however this emulator isn't available for mac as of now. I'm using a mac, so I have to use it in a Windows XP virtual machine. Is it going to be available for mac anytime soon?

James
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Re: PCem on OSX anytime soon?

Post by James »

The short answer: No.

Long answer:

1. PCem is developed primarily by Windows users -- as such, there is little in the way of support for the Linux operating system, or Mac OS X -- and there are no plans by the main developers to expand to full-scale OS X or Linux support anytime soon.

2. Technically, I am the maintainer of the only OS X branch of PCem, but I'm completely inexperienced and haven't made any progress on the emulator yet, and probably won't for the immediate future -- if I ever do.

louisw3
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Re: PCem on OSX anytime soon?

Post by louisw3 »

I just run it on wine.
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

athlonxp
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Re: PCem on OSX anytime soon?

Post by athlonxp »

James wrote:The short answer: No.

Long answer:

1. PCem is developed primarily by Windows users -- as such, there is little in the way of support for the Linux operating system, or Mac OS X -- and there are no plans by the main developers to expand to full-scale OS X or Linux support anytime soon.

2. Technically, I am the maintainer of the only OS X branch of PCem, but I'm completely inexperienced and haven't made any progress on the emulator yet, and probably won't for the immediate future -- if I ever do.
Thanks for the reply.

athlonxp
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Re: PCem on OSX anytime soon?

Post by athlonxp »

louisw3 wrote:I just run it on wine.
Thanks for your input. Do you advuse running in on wine? Does run in full speed? I mean if you configure a pentium 166, will it run as if it is really a pentium 166?

louisw3
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Re: PCem on OSX anytime soon?

Post by louisw3 »

athlonxp wrote:
louisw3 wrote:I just run it on wine.
Thanks for your input. Do you advuse running in on wine? Does run in full speed? I mean if you configure a pentium 166, will it run as if it is really a pentium 166?
Sure, its pretty peppy. PCem is CPU bound, not OS call bound.
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

sparcdr
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Re: PCem on OSX anytime soon?

Post by sparcdr »

Arguably, no unless you have an i5 or better CPU to do it. An i3 can effectively run up to a Pentium 120 from my experience (FMV heavy titles such as Silent Steel and what have you) on an Acer touchscreen notebook for my dad. I had to use VMware Player after all due to the fact that PCem dynamically recompiles the instructions on x86 even though it is x86 making the mouse extremely jittery. It only becomes acceptable to run a 166 or so on my i7 4790K @ 4GHz. I use retro benchmarks such as Winstone to compare performance vs the host.

The benefits however are Voodoo(1) emulation, more sound and video options due to how it can use the real ROMs and better support for Windows 98 (Non-SE) and below versions as well as odd-balls such as NeXTStep/IA32 and pre-9 Solaris compared to VMware proper or VirtualBox as a whole.

The other important part is that many installers of that era were hard-coded to detect things such as Trident TVGA or other specific chipsets (Resident Evil 1), 3DFX support which isn't cured by using GLIDE wrappers alone, Win16 API's not working due to lack of NTVDM on modern systems which necessitate using the real thing to "get at" the data, etc. For older things, even better since 486 emulation runs full speed even on a P4 chip, since there's again more video options and it runs as if it were the actual hardware due to the ROMs again: CGA, EGA, MGA, VGA and pre-VESA SVGA, Adlib (198x-1990), Soundblaster 1.0/2.0 (Pro, AWE32, Gold, 16) (1989-1997).

You could say it runs as a 166 and appears to be a 166 but other artifacts appear if the host can't keep up. Dynamic recompilation doesn't work with some CPU modes as well. For what it does, compared to cross-architecture emulators (dEmul, ePSXe, Qemu) it is actually acceptable, yes. I think it's particularly useful for retro DOS buffs that have one or another issue with how DOSBox behaves with timing as well. It also supports host gamepad/joystick to gameport mapping like DOSBox, but much easier since it mimics Sidewinder era and other at your choosing tech from the "golden era" of video games. It does chew up CPU cycles in its own effort to effectively lock the clockrate so that the guest in fact runs exactly the speed it should, and I have as to far so yet not had any real success using WHQLT, CPUIDLE or similar to reduce that overhead with DOS lineage operating systems.

Since it doesn't use VT-D to speed up the instructions mapping it doesn't have to sacrifice compatibility that modern hypervisors often do, HVM vs PV. It behaves much like Charon AXP or AlphaVM do in the fact they run quite acceptably and are supported on OS X / Linux hosts on Windows in virtualization with only a 10% or so performance hit despite not running natively. Similarly, DOSBox also does not require VT instructions to operate, though it's obviously available even on BeOS and Mac OS 9 so I digress.

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