PCem

Duke · 14 Feb 2023 at 20:50

I hadn't heard of this until I watched the LTT video on it below. Its kind of like WinUAE but for PC. It emulates old hardware rather than just the OS so you can configure a 'virtual machine' using actual hardware configurations from back in the day right down to BIOS level. I've been playing around with it to simulate roughly what my second PC would have been - P150 with Voodoo card in it and Windows 98. Think I might scrub it and create an XP machine. You can pass through your CD/DVD to it so can load up and run old games from original media. I think what I like about this over things like DOSBox is being able to have period correct setups and emulating real hardware so no compatibility issues with old things trying to work out what on earth a Ryzen CPU and Windows 10/11 is

It doesn't come with roms and of course won't discuss that here. You will need those to get going (for the hardware list) and for software, i.e. the OS and games etc.

PCem

Anyone else tried this or similar ones? What have you set up using it and why?

Metalface Mark · 15 Feb 2023 at 10:32

i tried to set it up the other day after watching the video but not as easy as its made out.

Cyber-Mav · 17 Feb 2023 at 11:51

iv been using it and it works quite well. i did send a fully working setup of pcem to @kar so he can chime in on how it is too. works far better than vmware for older os stuff pre win98.

Duke · 17 Feb 2023 at 14:33

It does take a bit of fiddling, going to spend a bit of time getting an XP one set up this weekend and hopefully later try some old games on it.

tangey · 17 Feb 2023 at 19:24

Interesting, I have an XP machine at work because I use an old software developement platform that I can not do without, and it refused to operate correctly on anything other than XP. THe crucial bit is a DOS link/compiler from that era that didn't like the emulation than was done to pretend the system was 32-bit. So I might give this a go on a modern PC. Because it's my daily use machine its a real pain because slowly all the XP browsers are becoming less and less supported and I have to switch to another PC to get "modern stuff" done.

Ice Rich · 23 Feb 2023 at 13:22

Not tried it but first heard of it on here a couple of months back and it does seem really interesting and would like to give it a go.
Presumably you would start from scratch and install an OS as you would if you just built a machine from back then?

Duke · 24 Feb 2023 at 08:44

Ice Rich said:
Not tried it but first heard of it on here a couple of months back and it does seem really interesting and would like to give it a go.
Presumably you would start from scratch and install an OS as you would if you just built a machine from back then?

Yes once you have some ROMs for hardware options you have a blank canvas so would need to mount an ISO for an OS

Guest2 · 28 Feb 2023 at 21:06

I’ve been using it for some time. Can't believe Linus has only just found out about PCem, it's already outdated and been replaced by 86Box (but I still use PCem)
The main flaw is that only single threaded CPU in the host can be used, so maxes out at around 233Mhz on a high end system. You would need around 8Ghz to properly emulate a PIII 400Mhz machine at 100%
86Box is the same, nothing to benefit using 86Box.

Setup is easy, pick your config and install your OS and drivers as you would if using real hardware - right down to the conflicts and bugs of real hardware.

Here's my config

CPU - Pentium MMX233
Motherboard - Intel i430VX
RAM - 64MB RAM
VGA - S3 Virge DX
3D - 3DFX Voodoo 1 4MB
Soundcard - AWE32 28MB
OS - Win 95 OSR2.5

I've used external floppy drives and and external CDRW connected to my machine. They work great (but are slower than mounting)
People have even used real ISA video cards with PCem! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jW1dGRhmsE

I also had an MS Dos 6.22 config running on a 486 AMI WinBIOS, DX4 100. Worked great for earlier DOS games

PCem 17

Some photos of the setup

Guest2 · 28 Feb 2023 at 21:17

Metalface Mark said:
i tried to set it up the other day after watching the video but not as easy as its made out.

There are way better (proper tutorial) guides than the Linus advertising video, such as Oligopolist's Tutorials.

'Setting up PCem for Windows 95 games'

Duke · 1 Mar 2023 at 17:24

What a great setup, so many classic games there. I'll take a look at 86Box as well.

To answer @Metalface Mark, yes the LTT video wasn't a full tutorial as Anthony had already set it up for him so it was very brief on that part.

Ice Rich · 2 Mar 2023 at 12:56

Guest2 said:
Some photos of the setup

Looks great

So you start PCem from your main PC, then 'power on' in the application and the VM computer starts to act exactly like it would a real machine? Do you still have access to PCem during this for tweaking etc? It's the using real hardware in this environment that I am struggling to get my head around

Where would you plug a 3.5mm cable for sound etc?

Guest2 · 2 Mar 2023 at 14:01

Ice Rich said:
Looks great
So you start PCem from your main PC, then 'power on' in the application and the VM computer starts to act exactly like it would a real machine? Do you still have access to PCem during this for tweaking etc? It's the using real hardware in this environment that I am struggling to get my head around Where would you plug a 3.5mm cable for sound etc?

Thanks.

Yep, start PCem config on main PC and thats just a secondary monitor which I set to full screen the PCem window.

It’s not a VM though as you set the hardware resources individually on the app. This way its way more accurate than a VM or any form of Dosbox…at the expense of requiring a lot of host resource (cpu)
You even configure the Awe32 RAM and can load soundfonts for windows use which you’ll see the awe card ram being used as a soundfont is loaded.

The real resources are connected to the host pc (in my case windows10) and are then available on the Pcem OS. E.g. connect a usb cd drive, select it instead of mounting an image and you’re free to use that cd drive in Win95. It comes with a pcem cd/dvd driver.

I guess you can connect other real hardware such as the usb isa video card or usb soundcards to varying degrees of success. I just use Voodoo and Awe32 as its a couple of dropdown boxes and provides the best compatibility in late dos and early Windows games.

Using built in mount and transfer options in pcem are much quicker. To get data into Pcem i either mount iso/bin/cue images or mount the disk in WinImage then drag and drop files/folders.
To get things from pcem os to host, you use a virtual zipdisk. Its nothing related to an actual zipdisk but it tricks the os into thinking it is. From memory mine is a 100mb file on my host machine which is mounted when required to the pcem setup. Ill check when i get home but it was simple enough to setup.

C - Primary master - HDD (8GB)
D - Primary slave - CD-ROM (PCemCD)
E - Secondary master - HDD (8GB)
F - Secondary slave - Iomega Zip

PCem you select Disc > Create blank disk image > 100MB (zip) > give it a name > save.
Then Load Zip drive > then select the .img file. You can now copy files out of the PCem system to this host file.

The great thing about PCem over real hardware (other than the space saving) is that it takes seconds to backup your entire system.
If things go bad, just restore it all in seconds.

It's done like that as Zipdisk would have been the largest format older system recognised. Winimage can also be used (when the system if off) to mount the HDD and modify as needed.

Ice Rich · 2 Mar 2023 at 15:18

That makes perfect sense and understand much clearer now, thank you for explaining.
It does sound great and I loved that early Windows era, i'm going to give it a go asap

tangey · 21 Mar 2023 at 13:15

Does this (or indeed anything similar) software give both the host OS and the emulated OS access to the same hard drive. i.e do they both have access to the same c: drive as C:

I need WinXP for some legacy software Dos/cmd software to run that fails to run correctly under a win10 cmd session, but at the same time I want Win10/11 to have access to the same files in the same location.

Ice Rich · 21 Mar 2023 at 14:37

From what I can gather , and Guest2 will know more , no you can't. There's some kind of complication there which is why that Zipdisk comes into play. I think you'll need to manually save/load.

Duke · 22 Mar 2023 at 15:40

No you create a disk image file and it uses that.

tangey · 22 Mar 2023 at 16:54

Ice Rich said:
From what I can gather , and Guest2 will know more , no you can't. There's some kind of complication there which is why that Zipdisk comes into play. I think you'll need to manually save/load.

Duke said:
No you create a disk image file and it uses that.

Yeah, that's what I thought, the two systems are hardly going to be able to access the same data in the same place, for one thing win10/11 has more modern file systems than were available on winxp.

Pity

Guest2 · 25 Mar 2023 at 08:16

tangey said:
Does this (or indeed anything similar) software give both the host OS and the emulated OS access to the same hard drive. i.e do they both have access to the same c: drive as C:

I need WinXP for some legacy software Dos/cmd software to run that fails to run correctly under a win10 cmd session, but at the same time I want Win10/11 to have access to the same files in the same location.

PCem you can create the drive and fdisk it then use it in Win9x / xp or whatever, then you can use WinImage on Windows 10 to mount that drive and copy files to it / delete / modify data.
Back on Win9x / other system you can use the Zipdisk to copy files out.

Using the exact same drive on both systems wont work because it’ll be a different file system and you’ll need to mount, edit then close.

It cant be used and mounted at the same time.

Well, you probably could but it would corrupt the data. Always best to get the drive in a know good state then take a backup of it. Plus it only takes a minute to restore / backup on fast ssd.

I would say just try it and have a play around like I did. At least there’s no physical hardware to break!