Why EMULATE PC Games??

[manikyath]

Just now, JohnnyGrey said:

Forgive me if this exists elsewhere on the forums, but do you guys have a recommendation for software to backup old CD-ROMs? I still have a ton of games from the Windows 98 era, such as Duke Nukem 3D, Wolfenstein, etc, and I would love to back them up. 

CDburnerXP will do that for you.

[Thaldor]

I am pulling this out of my memory so it might be not accurate.

 

The big difference when it comes to retro PC games between Windows 95 and Windows 98 is actually the DOS kernel on which both are running. While Windows 98 is closer to modern OS's where kernel is pretty much the OS, Windows 95 worked like Windows 3.1 and was more GUI over MS-DOS. As in Windows 95 ran over fully fledged MS-DOS and you could jump between the two on the run without much hassle apart from quite a lot of resources being eaten by Win95 on the background while running in MS-DOS mode. You could also boot Win95 PC into full MS-DOS mode where none of the Win95 is loaded and you are running strictly MS-DOS on the whole hardware. Win98 on the other hand used MS-DOS only as a boot stage and so Win98 doesn't have complete MS-DOS.

 

Win95 and MS-DOS also gave this kind of interesting platform in retrospect. The MS-DOS was fully 16-bit. OS while Win95 was 32-bit. OS, while Win95 was launched the MS-DOS was demoted to be mostly just 16-bit. compatibility layer for drivers while running DOS in Win95 command prompt gave MS-DOS support for 32-bit. device drivers through Win95. So, you could any DOS programs on Win95 and enjoy all the hardware bonuses (like working mouse) on them through Win95. There also wasn't really any Win98 only software but everything was Win95/98 so if you really didn't need PnP USB or some very limited WDM hardware (Windows Driver Model, it really took off only after Win2000 and with XP), fairly broken hibernation, better networking or DVD drive, you are better off with Win95 in matter of broader software support.

[Vishera]

7 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Are VMs not a thing anymore?

With modern hardware there are huge compatibility issues with VMs running old games.

7 hours ago, DANK_AS_gay said:

AFAIK they simulate a fairly basic GPU, and if I remember correctly VMs are more complicated and resource intensive than an emulator, but I could be wrong on both fronts.

I am using VMware, and the virtual GPU on the latest versions is actually pretty good, have a look:

 

6 hours ago, manikyath said:

VMs are not a good solution for retro games, i've tried, tirelessly, to make a VM work to play windows 98 games.. and it's just not a decent solution.

Same here, at the end i installed Windows 2000 bare metal on my FX 8320E/HD 6970 machine with drivers and everything:

 

There are minor compatibility issues with Windows 2000 but they are fixable.

Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D, The Elder Scrolls II Daggerfall all working pretty well on my setup.

 

That machine is also capable of running significantly newer games (Windows 2000/Windows 7 Dual Boot):

 

 

 

[fwdhsenid]

Where do we find the compatible BIOS for pcem ?

[sleepy_steve]

Quote

 

I'm still trying to find the "The Best of Microsoft Entertainment Pack"  to download and try running SkiFree and JezzBall on windows 10.

 

In 10 minutes of searching, I've found one corrupted floppy ISO that gives a checksum in the webpage, but fails to say what algorithm to use to expect that same checksum value (I tried sha1, sha256, and md5 without success), and a partial dump of EXE's for one of the other packs on github.

 

I'm apparently not the only nostalgic fool who wants to relive their childhood, but either there's a step I'm missing or it's more complex than it appears at first glance. 

 

Update -- Found a lot of what I was looking for on Archive.org

 

Now mainly missing:

• Pipe Dream
• Chip's Challenge
• SkiFree
• JezzBall

For reference I remember playing these as a wee lad on my first PC; a windows 95 beast that had a Pentium 133 and a maxed out 256MB of EDO RAM.

[METALAGENT47]

I've been working on getting PCem for houors today just so i can play Nocturne, but alas, i can't get a proper set up going. so i tried with older dos games, and that worked mostly... no mouse in dos tho for some reason. and despite all my effort to get winipconfig up or whatever, it acted like it just wasn't available on the system. Admittedly i'm the big dumb. but i'm trying 86box now....

I just want to play Nocturne and the Blair witch games in a VM or emulator or something. Nolf and some of those.... Windows xp will likely be the best solution but even PCem slows down on my rig weirdly.

 

[CerealExperimentsLain]

Quote

The most reliable way to transfer files is to burn it to flippin CDR.

Like... My Windows 98/ME and XP retro PCs both happily see the shares from my UnRAID machine out of the box...  Just plug it into the LAN and it's in buisness.

[Itomeshi]

11 hours ago, Radium_Angel said:

Are VMs not a thing anymore?

VMs are absolutely a thing - but they are good at being modern VMs on modern host hardware for modern OSes.

For example, look at Hyper-V on Windows (most VM hypervisors are similar here):

• Hyper-V offers two 'generations' of hardware: Gen 2 which has UEFI-based firmware and requires a 64-bit OS, and Gen 1 which has a BIOS and has 32-bit and 64-bit OS support. This isn't helpful for accurate DOS-based OSes, which are 16-bit and needs a BIOS.
• Hyper-V has a minimum of 32MB of RAM for a VM. Win 95 required 4MB of RAM, but more than 480MB of RAM or a CPU faster than 2.1Ghz has issues, per Wikipedia:
  Windows 95 may fail to boot on computers with a processor faster than 2.1 GHz and more than approximately 480 MB of memory. In such a case, reducing the file cache size or the size of video memory can help. The theoretical maximum according to Microsoft is 2 GB.
• Hyper-V doesn't control the instruction set or speed of the CPU being passed through (see above for where speed can be a problem to even boot, and that's not including individual software that may behave poorly on a fast CPU).
• This doesn't even get into the peripherals shown to the OS - network cards, video cards, expansion buses, etc.

Modern VM hosts don't maintain old virtual hardware as doing so tends to hinder performance/increase complexity for modern OSes. 99.99% of Hyper-V use cases would NEVER need a PCI, MCA or ISA bus instead of PCI-E, so the value proposition for maintaining code to support those is nearly non-existent.

 

By emulating the hardware, you can offer exact behavior, quirks and all. A piece of software that ran best on a 266Mhz Pentium II can get a Pentium II at a virtual 266MHz. The line between VM and emulation is always a little fuzzy (when it presents a fake network card to the guest OS, that's an emulated network card of a specific well known model, like an Intel gigabit NIC).

Fun aside: Meanwhile, we make it fuzzy on the other end as well: a Docker container is a virtualized Linux (or, in VERY rare cases, Windows) userland that uses Virtualization-Based Security to share the host's Linux kernel (instead of providing a standardized pass-through hardware platform or emulating a hardware platform wholesale).

[Itomeshi]

3 hours ago, sleepy_steve said:

Update -- Found a lot of what I was looking for on Archive.org

 

Now mainly missing:

• Pipe Dream
• Chip's Challenge
• SkiFree
• JezzBall

For reference I remember playing these as a wee lad on my first PC; a windows 95 beast that had a Pentium 133 and a maxed out 256MB of EDO RAM.

FYI: A modern rebuild of Chip's Challenge from the original author is available on Steam. Chip's Challenge 2 is $5, and a 3D spiritual successor 'Chuck's Challenge 3D' is $10.

[dogwitch]

also with modern vm. some stuff like ryzne master wont work. if you turn certain things on and off. for vm software.

oh and you dont know that. seeing its not doc..... found that out the hard way.....

[Radium_Angel]

4 hours ago, Itomeshi said:

VMs are absolutely a thing - but they are good at being modern VMs on modern host hardware for modern OSes.

I run WinNT 4.0 under a VM without issue. MS'es implementation of VM may be flawed, but other VM program exist which will emulate just fine

[ahuckphin]

I've attempted to repair a Windows 98 era PC before. It is from a time before the standardization and simplicity we've come to be used to in the past 18 years. 

 

PC won, I lost. 

[Birblover12]

23 hours ago, manikyath said:

i'm setting up 86Box as we speak to test out this theory.

Any luck? Really curious as to whether I should try giving AoM another whirl.

[manikyath]

1 minute ago, Birblover12 said:

Any luck? Really curious as to whether I should try giving AoM another whirl.

i didnt test the game i struggled with the most because i apparently forgot to back up the disk, but it went fine for the stuff i tested.

 

it does seem that 86box isnt all that efficient about how it emulates the GPU though, perhaps that's because i didnt pick a particularly efficient set of options, or perhaps it's just really limited to the early win9x days or earlier.

i basicly had a single cpu core pinned troughout testing.

 

so pretty much.. stick to stuff from before the turn of the century.

[Birblover12]

41 minutes ago, manikyath said:

 

it does seem that 86box isnt all that efficient about how it emulates the GPU though,

I think my issue is that when I used VirtualBox to run my Windows 7 VM, it emulated some generic fake GPU which Windows barely knew what it was. So, in theory, if I can get some program so emulate a real GPU that was used around the time, it should work. Not sure if 86box or something else has that capability, couldn't tell by LTT's video.

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, Birblover12 said:

I think my issue is that when I used VirtualBox to run my Windows 7 VM, it emulated some generic fake GPU which Windows barely knew what it was. So, in theory, if I can get some program so emulate a real GPU that was used around the time, it should work. Not sure if 86box or something else has that capability, couldn't tell by LTT's video.

86box emulates a number of possible GPU's from the time, it just appears to use no form of acceleration what so ever, and is just doing so in software.

[manikyath]

On 2/8/2023 at 7:25 PM, Birblover12 said:

Any luck? Really curious as to whether I should try giving AoM another whirl.

i've dug up the disk and tested the troublesome game, and because i was in the pile of disks anyways, i also tried 'transport giant tycoon', which is a REALLY late 98SE compatible game (it's XP era, but backwards compatible), it's a lot to pull for a system of the era 86box sort of sits in, but to my surprise it *works-ish*. it's sluggish as hell, but the game uses a REALLY weird rendering engine that doesnt work well with modern systems (and VM's), and 86box seems so far so good.

 

having that said.. i'm having some very weird behavior around running games from a mounted disk image, getting all sorts of funny bluescreens (in emulator).

 

it's not as good as just running stuff bare metal on the correct hardware, but it's sort of at the level of 'PS1 and older' emulation: it might not be perfect.. but it's good enough for the convience factor to make sense.

 

in my case - the retro boxes arent going anywhere anytime soon, but i could see myself make 86box wrappers for some of the games i have on them.

[BrianTheElectrician]

On 2/7/2023 at 6:16 PM, sleepy_steve said:

Update -- Found a lot of what I was looking for on Archive.org

 

Now mainly missing:

• Pipe Dream
• Chip's Challenge
• SkiFree
• JezzBall

For reference I remember playing these as a wee lad on my first PC; a windows 95 beast that had a Pentium 133 and a maxed out 256MB of EDO RAM.

https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-entertainm/best-of

 

WinWorld has many disc/disk images of abandonware. I've used it for years and never had an issue, I consider all their images safe. I've linked the page for the "Best of" the entertainment pack which I believe has most of the games you're looking for, but there are other pages for images of each full collection. You should be able to directly mount the image in PCEM or most/all other emulation software.

[HereticSin]

Just a thought on the file sharing aspect of this video with the host computer.  I wonder if it would have worked if "SMB 1.0' was installed in the Windows Features section of the host computer.  Going to Control Panel, then Programs and Features, and clicking "Turn Windows features on or off", and installing SMB 1.0 might make it work.

 

This is a feature that was disabled from new installs ever since a specific Windows 10 build came out (not sure which one but it was fairly late into the lifecycle).  It even gets uninstalled from machines that currently has it installed if it's not used within 30 days of the update being installed I think....  I've seen this as a problem with many computers that need to talk to Windows XP machines.

[thesweetiger]

I use Vmware for old gamin which run some game without issue., i have  few driver kit for windows 3.11 to XP and for dos. Vmware support gpu acceleration up to dx9, also vm support lpt ,com , usb , floppy dvd ,and hard drive direct access to the guest, good for software requiring a dongle like in lpt port.

Virtual machine is more efficience since we have now integrate feature in our processor which allow vm to use it direcrly, the sad thing is well a little nvidia trap about VM just the main issue is signed microsoft. Windows home and pro have passthrough limitation which are are available in windows server.

Mean microsoft allow actually only gpu passthrought and very limited

Just if you want to use old graphic card look on linux , you can passthrought almost anything on a Kvm/qemu setup, well if you remember linus making a dual pc in one and play big game on it , well it was this setup behind.