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v13 released!

Posted: Mon 11 Dec, 2017 9:13 pm
by SarahWalker
v13 is now out. Changes from v12 :
  • New machines added - Atari PC3, Epson PC AX, Epson PC AX2e, GW-286CT GEAR, IBM PS/2 Model 30-286, IBM PS/2 Model 50, IBM PS/2 Model 55SX, IBM PS/2 Model 80, IBM XT Model 286, KMX-C-02, Samsung SPC-4200P, Samsung SPC-4216P, Toshiba 3100e
  • New graphics cards - ATI Video Xpression, MDSI Genius
  • New sound cards added - Disney Sound Source, Ensoniq AudioPCI (ES1371), LPT DAC, Sound Blaster PCI 128
  • New hard drive controllers added - AT Fixed Disk Adapter, DTC 5150X, Fixed Disk Adapter (Xebec), IBM ESDI Fixed Disk Controller, Western Digital WD1007V-SE1
  • New SCSI adapters added - Adaptec AHA-1542C, BusLogic BT-545S, Longshine LCS-6821N, Rancho RT1000B, Trantor T130B
  • New network adapters added - NE2000 compatible
  • New cross-platform GUI
  • Voodoo SLI emulation
  • Improvements to Sound Blaster emulation
  • Improvements to Pentium timing
  • Various bug fixes
  • Minor optimisations
As ever, thanks to everyone who contributed, whether it be through patches, bug reports, or just general support. v13 ended up being a much bigger release than I had originally intended, and it's only with the help of people here that I got it out without completely losing my mind.

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Mon 11 Dec, 2017 10:20 pm
by terub56
Thanks Sarah (and others) for this great emulator!

Lots of nice changes and additions from v12

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Mon 11 Dec, 2017 10:57 pm
by shermanp
The 50ms sound buffer option seems to be broken on the Windows release build of V13 (at least for my host pc). The 100ms buffer length works, but is pretty choppy.

The culprit appears to be the use of the (comparatively) ancient OpenAL32 dll from Creative. I would suggest switching the release build of pcem to using the latest OpenAL binary from the OpenAL Soft project, available here: http://kcat.strangesoft.net/openal.html

The OpenAL Soft dll is a direct drop in replacement for the OpenAL32.dll provided by Creative. Just copy the "soft-oal.dll" from the <openal-soft-bin>\bin\Win32\ directory to the pcem directory. Rename or remove the existing "OpenAL32.dll" file, and rename "soft-oal.dll" to "OpenAL32.dll".

Note that linux users will almost certainly be using OpenAL Soft as their OpenAL library, and is likely what bit was using when developing the new wx GUI

EDIT: as leilei pointed out, OpenAL-soft breaks the output gain functionality.

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Tue 12 Dec, 2017 12:34 am
by omarsis81
Major update! Getting my hands on it right away! Thank you very, very much! =)

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Tue 12 Dec, 2017 12:47 am
by gen_angry
sweet :D thanks a bunch!

edit: note, README and NEWS files are blank. (and Im probably the only clown that actually reads those, lol)

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Tue 12 Dec, 2017 12:56 am
by omarsis81
gen_angry wrote:sweet :D thanks a bunch!

edit: note, README and NEWS files are blank. (and Im probably the only clown that actually reads those, lol)
You're not the only one! I read the "About" under "PCem Machine" and still says version 12

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Tue 12 Dec, 2017 6:56 am
by szadycbr
Great news, and it looks like it is much more stable in linux 64, but host CPU requirements rise about 20-30% and it is much slower, but overall it seems to work better. well i guess nothing for free and stability costs performance. The recompiler in voodoo broken, do not turns on or off and appears to be off all the time, no difference.
Ahh, the Linux, i wish i had Windows, but Thank You very much Sarah, now nothing crashes at all, everything just works!!! but sadly , before i could run windows on P100 at 100% now i get 80% on P75. Still i am happy, just need to change my ancient hardware :)

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Tue 12 Dec, 2017 11:27 pm
by leilei

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Wed 13 Dec, 2017 5:13 am
by Katakis
Umm... you didn't update the PCem front page.

But thanks. Wow, what a major update!

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Wed 13 Dec, 2017 6:48 pm
by SarahWalker
Looks updated to me...

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Wed 13 Dec, 2017 7:07 pm
by omarsis81
it IS updated indeed! Katakis, you may need to refresh the web site or clear the browser's cache

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Wed 13 Dec, 2017 10:29 pm
by JosepMa
As for the OpenAL32.dll, It also performs badly here. A direct replacement is removing it and placing msys2 libopenal-1.dll in PCem's dir (not even needed to rename it).

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Thu 14 Dec, 2017 12:26 am
by leilei
FYI - Msys2's comes from OpenAL Soft as linked above (and is outdated in a bundle)

I should also mention OpenAL Soft doesn't support PCem's recent output volume feature.

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Thu 14 Dec, 2017 9:37 pm
by shermanp
leilei wrote:FYI - Msys2's comes from OpenAL Soft as linked above (and is outdated in a bundle)

I should also mention OpenAL Soft doesn't support PCem's recent output volume feature.
Crap, was wondering why the output gain didn't have any effect. Switched back to supplied OpenAL, which does work.

Now that PCem uses SDL, maybe replacing OpenAL with SDL mixer might be an option in the future. As far as I can make out, from a quick browse of the source, OpenAL is only being used to mix sources and send them to the host sound device.

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Fri 15 Dec, 2017 2:13 am
by leilei
Maybe more as an option. Replacing working components with SDL is a huge YMMV for Windows users, and there's the potential to take advantage of OpenAL's EFX stuff to simulate a pc speaker against a metal case+positioning (As well as doing that for future sound effects of drives working)

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Fri 22 Dec, 2017 2:26 pm
by VenoMpie
Thanks for the Release everyone!
Better late than never I suppose but I was offline a couple of weeks due to lightning damage :P

What's next for v14? Riva TNT hopefully?

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Fri 22 Dec, 2017 2:51 pm
by SarahWalker
I don't have any plans to emulate nVidia stuff. Banshee/Voodoo 3 are fairly likely, along with the new recompiler. Though I'm toying with doing a smaller v14 release early in the year, with the new recompiler coming in v15 towards the end of the year. Haven't made any decision on that yet though.

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Fri 22 Dec, 2017 4:15 pm
by TonyM
Maybe add a PCI network adapter that is PnP compatible. I can't get the NE2000 Compatible to work under OS/2 Warp.

Also, in Linux, is there any networking option other than SLiRP? When compiled with --enable-networking I don't see any other options and SLiRP doesn't seem to work for me.

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Fri 22 Dec, 2017 5:44 pm
by omarsis81
SarahWalker wrote:I don't have any plans to emulate nVidia stuff. Banshee/Voodoo 3 are fairly likely, along with the new recompiler. Though I'm toying with doing a smaller v14 release early in the year, with the new recompiler coming in v15 towards the end of the year. Haven't made any decision on that yet though.
Do you think the new recompiler would pave the way to more powerful CPUs? Like the Pentium II?
Did you make any progress with the Out-of-Order Execution issue?

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Fri 22 Dec, 2017 8:33 pm
by SarahWalker
Wait and be patient - I haven't even started writing it yet!

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Fri 22 Dec, 2017 9:15 pm
by gen_angry
SarahWalker wrote:Wait and be patient - I haven't even started writing it yet?
We all just enjoy it so much that it's like candy. More! more! more!

Thank you (and all contributors) for all the work that you do. :)

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Fri 22 Dec, 2017 10:03 pm
by omarsis81
gen_angry wrote:
SarahWalker wrote:Wait and be patient - I haven't even started writing it yet?
We all just enjoy it so much that it's like candy. More! more! more!
Thank you (and all contributors) for all the work that you do. :)
That's exactly it gen_angry! With PCem I'm playing games that I missed from the era re-playing my favorites ones! I'm very grateful to Sarah and contributors

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Fri 22 Dec, 2017 11:16 pm
by leilei
The only other "feasibly possible" 3d card I can think of are Rendition cards, only because their papers are out there and the card works similarly to how an AudioPCI works (running off software code), it was never possible for a wrapper to happen since it was like that. What really goes against them are their slow VGA...

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Sat 23 Dec, 2017 2:45 am
by Katakis
omarsis81 wrote:it IS updated indeed! Katakis, you may need to refresh the web site or clear the browser's cache
The front page eventually updated for me, but as soon as v13.1 was released, but I didn't need to refresh anything.

Also, I noticed that Battler was missing from the acknowledgments. Considering that he is working on 86Box, maybe he doesn't have time to work on PCem anymore. As far as I know, all he contributed to v13 was a fix to a memory leak.

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Sat 23 Dec, 2017 10:25 am
by SarahWalker
As far as I'm concerned, at this point Battler and his friends have completely broken off from this project, and I'd like to keep it that way.

Re: v13 released!

Posted: Sun 24 Dec, 2017 6:27 pm
by tk421
Congratulations on releasing v13.1! I will give it a try when I can.

Happy Holidays!