USB floppies (usually) are very limited. Usually they only support 1.44Mb disk, with 2 sides, 80 tracks, 18 sectors/track (starting at 0), and 512 bytes/sector (some of them also support 9 sectors/track). Usually there is no way to read odd-numbered or odd-sized sectors (Opera Soft games used to hav...

I wonder if MAME/MESS guys have some infos/dumps for these computers (and the more interesting Amstrad 2000 series). MESS has a driver (I don't know if it works or is a skeleton driver) for Amstrad PC2386, but there are no drivers for other (unemulated by PCem) Amstrad computers. In the meantime the...

I've got a set of two spanish disk for Olivetti PCS 86. Disk 1 have MS-DOS 3.30, Disk 2 have some MS-DOS files, a tutorial and a diagnostic utility. I had a friend that had a Olivetti PCS33. It came with DOS 5.0, Windows 3.x (I think it was 3.1, but maybe it was 3.0) and a disk compression utility (...

I wonder if it would be possible to make a "fake" pass-through video card... I mean, a "fake" video card in the sense that it would appear as a physical one; a pass-through in the sense that any DirectX / OpenGL call would be passed to the OS. It would require to write code insid...

Commit this revision, please. Three methods to get your wishes granted: - Put a zero in that request (i.e.: PCem v150) and maybe in that revision all your request are fullfilled. - Pay programmers to do the work. - Make your own changes to the code so it support those items. Other means may not gua...

Is your disk empty? As far as I remember, in MS-DOS 1, 2 and 3 SYS needed an empty disk to work. MS-DOS 4 needed a few sectors free at the beginning of the disk or it wouldn't work (so, in practice, it was the same as needing a completely empty disk). In DOS 5 an 6, SYS could work in any disk (if it...

PCem is not entirely cycle accurate, but the performance should be similar. Assuming that your system can emulate your machines at 100% speed, you should note performance differences (i.e.: the IBM AT should be slower than a PC-30 III, because the former had a 6 or 8 Mhz but the latter shipped with ...

They have different BIOSes, chipsets, components and feelings. Original IBM AT ran at 6 or 8 Mhz, but later machines (i.e.: Award 286 clone) could have 25 Mhz CPUs. Some chipsets were fasters than others or have some capabilities (EMM) fully integrated on BIOS. Also, the machines came with different...

My wife had a real Pentium 75 and a Sound Blaster PCI 64, and when playing MIDI some kind of interference could be heard. I guess that was because PCI64 uses system memory to play MIDI, and it was a bus hog. After changing her computer (to a PIII 500 or so), MIDI played fine... but in any case, that...

I think you've misread it -- the 'Secondary EGA' settings mean that the built-in EGA remains active, but a CGA or MDA card in an expansion slot is used as the primary display. Sorry, I was referring to the fact that second and third line of settings imply that Amstrad could set up the computer with...

How about displays? AFAIK, PC1640 was sold with three displays: MD (monochrome), CD (colour), ECD (EGA colour). I'm not sure about it, but I guess that MD and CD were CGA monitors (so they couldn't display EGA modes). Maybe the card is not "locked" (you could try to start EGA modes with an...

So I've updated to PCEM v13.1 (without patches) and I've been testing some Amstrad PCs, and I've got some bugs to report. 1.- Since the first time I tried PCem there is a bug on keyboard controller. If I switch out of PCem using CTRL+End, after going back to PCem it seems that control key has became...

Does this GUI works in Windows?

I like that windows that shows the current video mode...

I've compiled v12 version of PCem with my Debian (64 bits). It needed two changes to work (both 'depcomp' and 'missing' links are pointing to older versions of automake; needed to add -m32 to compiler flags). After that, I've tried to select /dev/sdc as HDD image file but it didn't work. But after m...

I would like to this feature request! I currently have a 512 MB, 1 GB and 2 GB flash drive formatted as a FAT partition, a 1 GB and 2 GB compact flash and a 2 GB SD card that can be used to run under MS-DOS/Windows 95. I suspect reading from a FAT32 host would be much easier to implement Sorry, may...

Is it possible? The entire story (so you can figure what am I trying to do): I've got a ZX-Uno . It is a FPGA based computer with the same size factor as a Raspberry Pi. Although it was made thinking about doing a hardware emulated ZX Spectrum, the designers added the capability to hold and use up t...

PC-compatibles are limited to 640k (which IIRC wasn't enough to link Microsoft's linker, so they had a special machine with 1MB addressable RAM just for linking the linker :) The 640k barrier is a convention, not a limit. The CPU can address up to 1 Mb, but DOS gets only the first 640 Kb (because m...

Note that the mount instruction will mount the first partition. If you have more than one partition, you'll need other instruction to access other partitions.

I've got some kind of strange bug with keyboard on v12 (official build). It seems (almost) the same keyboard bug reported here . - It happened to me on some Amstrad PCs (Amstrad PC2086, Sinclair PC200). - Other computers (i.e.: Compaq 386, 430VX) are not affected. - After pressing CTRL+END to switch...

I am not sure you need any Microsoft update patches to run Win95. Obviously having the OSR2 version might help, but on its own Win95 can do many tasks without additional patches from Microsoft. Back then you did not need constant patches, service packs and updates from Microsoft. Indeed, Win98 alwa...

Awesome! How did you get Windows 95 J to achieve 9 FAT16 partitions? :D If he used only a hard disk, I guess he defined a system partition and then two extended partitions with four FAT16 volumes inside. Or he could have used more hard disks (up to three). I know for a fact that there is a way for ...

From what I can see, the Xebec controller is a bit limited in what drives are supported - the first two variants only support 10 MB drives, the later (AT) variant also supports 20. Probably a more flexible controller would be the best one to start with I think. Keep on mind that some computers (i.e...

I'd use alias instead of full strings. I mean, using "pcxt" (the rom directory) is less prone to errors than "Generic XT clone".

Also, getting the index from an array of strings is not so complex and performance is not a concern (it will be done only at startup).

YES! The config file architecture is very annoying. Everything defaults to pcem.cfg when saving. I've had to resort to making multiple copies of the whole folder with all extraneous rom/bios files just to accommodate different emulated PC's. Although the default saving is to pcem.cfg (and the defau...

Maybe that's the problem. In Unix world, ALI1429G.AMW, ali1429g.amw and ALI1429g.amw are different things. In Windows, capitalisation doesn't matter. Note that Linux will check capitalisation even if the files are placed in FAT or NTFS filesystems. Check the source code (the file mem.c) to find the ...

PCem has some lists with machine types, CPU types and so on. When new releases come, items in those lists change their order so old config can be no longer valid. In some cases (machine type has changed) they may work. On other cases (CPU type is invalid), PCem will stuck on a grey screen or crash w...

Why Intel? Although Intel has CPUs with higher performance than AMD (so, in the high end Intel beats AMD), in the middle and lower end AMD usually offers better price for the same performance. On the lower end (APUs), Intel integrated video cards suuuuucks.

Is there any reason to prefer Intel?

I originally came to know about PCEm following a Vogons thread which unceremoniously labeled it as "Another PC Emulator". But frankly, I can't seem to find a peer in terms of an architecture that allows for all the basic components of an X86 pc to be emulated separately, complete with BIO...

Voodoo2 support up to 12 MB per card, so in SLI you get the whooping amount of 24 MB Are you sure? AFAIK, in Voodoo2 SLI a card was drawing odd lines and the other card drawed even lines. The memory was NOT shared between cards, but both cards had to have the same textures loaded (because they were...

But floppy B: was defined as 720k on PCem, BIOS and the disk image (737280 bytes, with DOS format). If both A: and B: are defined as 720k it works, but if A: is defined as 1.44Mb and B: is defined as 720Kb, formatting B: won't work. I forgot to mention: I'm using "vanilla" PCem v11, not an...