ANNOUNCEMENT: MichaelJManley taking over as PCem maintainer

[SarahWalker]

I'm pleased to announce that MichealJManley is taking over as the maintainer of PCem. While I'll still be around to a degree, Michael will taking over day to day development, and will decide the future direction of the project.

[MichaelJManley]

Hello everyone! As Sarah mentioned I will be taking over the development of PCem. Everyone feel free to give any ideas for any future ideas and I will see if they are feasible. I will start going though some refactoring to get it ready for a plugin interface and any bug fixes along the way. I’m excited to start developing and making PCem good for not only retro gaming but even great as a operating system development tool!

[leilei]

Welcome!

[gen_angry]

Oh this place is back? Nice.

Hello everyone! As Sarah mentioned I will be taking over the development of PCem. Everyone feel free to give any ideas for any future ideas and I will see if they are feasible. I will start going though some refactoring to get it ready for a plugin interface and any bug fixes along the way. I’m excited to start developing and making PCem good for not only retro gaming but even great as a operating system development tool!

Sounds great! Can't wait to see where it goes. I don't use it that much anymore (have two retro rigs now) but it's great for testing combos to see if they're feasible and/or that oddball game that just won't work on what I have.

[leilei]

I will start going though some refactoring to get it ready for a plugin interface and any bug fixes along the way. I

IMO I don't think the MinGW makefiles had to be nuked. They were very convenient in that I didn't need to install autotools on windows as that was a pain, so right now i'm currently figuring out cmake trying to get it to notice my WxWidgets install in MinGW32


as for plugins, some console emulators that had them are dropping them (PCSX2 etc). Hope you're not thinking of modularizing emulation of internal components.

[MichaelJManley]

I will start going though some refactoring to get it ready for a plugin interface and any bug fixes along the way. I

IMO I don't think the MinGW makefiles had to be nuked. They were very convenient in that I didn't need to install autotools on windows as that was a pain, so right now i'm currently figuring out cmake trying to get it to notice my WxWidgets install in MinGW32


as for plugins, some console emulators that had them are dropping them (PCSX2 etc). Hope you're not thinking of modularizing emulation of internal components.

For it to notice, you use -G "MSYS2 Makefiles", in a MSYS command line. Why I have no clue. And you just can install CMake from MSYS as well. If you were not using MSYS, I will look into restoring and updating them to the new structure. I will make it a TODO I honestly didn't think they were used anymore.

I will say Autotools is gone, it was removed and I do not plan to bring that back. I do have a bit of a sore spot for it lol.

The plugin idea, to an extent. I am not planning to modularize anything existing, if anything I was going to make it to where a plugin can add to the structures already there, and be able to function that way. Kinda like the Linux kernel. You can have baked in components. And I don't see modularizing everything to make any sense, if anything it would complicate it.

[CryptidWorks]

Good the see the project has found a new dev with Sarah's blessing and been resurrected.

I look forward to seeing what kind of improvements and features future builds bring

[MrMe85]

Happy to see the project is back!

[Soren]

It is awesome that the project is back.

I am really happy that Sarah is still going to be around.
Looking forward to what the future brings, as this is, in my experience, far the best emulator out there, for the projects I am wokring on.

/Søren

[f00barbob]

Was really starting to get interested in this project just before the shutdown... glad things are moving forward. Hopefully I'll have something to contribute.

[shermanp]

Yay, PCem is back. Thanks @MichaelJManley

I was thinking of replacing Autotools with Meson, but you beat me to it with CMake. Ah well, anything's better than Autotools!

Personally, I feel maintaining the mingw makefiles will be a PITA. Inevitably, someone will add a new source file, and forget to update the mingw makefile as well as the CMakeLists.txt. It happened in the past with the Autotools system.

Looking forward to see where the project goes.

[MichaelJManley]

Personally, I feel maintaining the mingw makefiles will be a PITA. Inevitably, someone will add a new source file, and forget to update the mingw makefile as well as the CMakeLists.txt. It happened in the past with the Autotools system.

Well if I bring those back, I would just create a cmake script that just writes out objects and correct parameters to a makefile, so its easy to update.

[ruben_balea]

Welcome MichealJManley!

[Ahayri]

Happy to see the project is back!

[MrPepka]

OK, I have some ideas:
1. Is it possible to add support for PowerVR and NV1 graphics emulation? It is not possible to play games written on PowerVR or NV1 on modern computers, so emulation of the above-mentioned accelerators would be welcome
2. Is it possible to support disc image formats such as MDF/MDS, NRG or CCD/SUB/IMG? In particular, adding support for CloneCD and Nero image formats seems to be easy, worse with MDF/MDS
3. Is it possible to add some more CPUs, motherboards and sockets?

[Vaporeon]

as for plugins, some console emulators that had them are dropping them (PCSX2 etc). Hope you're not thinking of modularizing emulation of internal components.

I actually think a plug-in system makes complete sense for a generic x86-based machine emulator. For things like console emulation is makes much less sense as there is only one set of hardware that tightly integrates into the system over a non-standard interface. There is only one correct way to emulate this hardware so you only end up with plugins of varying quality that try to achieve the same task. Once each component has been emulated correctly the usefulness of using a plugin system this way is lost.

With something like PCem however it would make much more sense to be able to implement different addon hardware like PCI devices in a way that does not involve having to fork the entire emulator and get the code up-streamed just for people to be able to use it. These plugins would have a reason to be separated as they could each implement different devices rather than competing implementations of one strictly defined device.

I forgot to say, hello MichaelJManley and thank you for taking up the project!

[leilei]

For it to notice, you use -G "MSYS2 Makefiles", in a MSYS command line. Why I have no clue. And you just can install CMake from MSYS as well. If you were not using MSYS, I will look into restoring and updating them to the new structure. I will make it a TODO I honestly didn't think they were used anymore.

My cmake's too old (3.10) to generate "MSYS2 Makefiles" but has the same trouble generating "MSYS Makefiles" as it does for "MinGW Makefiles".

FWIW my building chain is MinGW32 with GCC 4.7.2 (with no IDEs). PCem v17 could build on that using SDL2, Wx 3.0 (with just the TDM-compiled libraries) and OpenAL fine and I would make it from executing a batch file on Windows so I don't have to futz with a unix shell. (I mainly have an old GCC around to build Win9X stuff and the same mingw worked well enough for PCem that I kept with it)

[Kalle]

Hi,
glad to heare the project will continue
I also habe a feature proposal: As many are probably running the emulator on big modern screens it would be great to have the possibility to run in fullscreen but with your non fullscreen window size so you would have black borders all around to mimic the smaller screens sizes of the past. Having to run Norton Commander fullscreen on 34 inches looks a bit to much

[dreamer]

Welcome back! PCEm is too good to just die like this, I'm glad you managed to find a comfortable arrangement for all of this.

[siljo1]

Hello everyone! As Sarah mentioned I will be taking over the development of PCem. Everyone feel free to give any ideas for any future ideas and I will see if they are feasible. I will start going though some refactoring to get it ready for a plugin interface and any bug fixes along the way. I’m excited to start developing and making PCem good for not only retro gaming but even great as a operating system development tool!

Welcome!

[DOS]

Thanks Sarah and Michael!

My cmake's too old (3.10) to generate "MSYS2 Makefiles" but has the same trouble generating "MSYS Makefiles" as it does for "MinGW Makefiles".

FWIW my building chain is MinGW32 with GCC 4.7.2 (with no IDEs). PCem v17 could build on that using SDL2, Wx 3.0 (with just the TDM-compiled libraries) and OpenAL fine and I would make it from executing a batch file on Windows so I don't have to futz with a unix shell. (I mainly have an old GCC around to build Win9X stuff and the same mingw worked well enough for PCem that I kept with it)

CMake is definitely much more friendly (perhaps there are even better options these days, but I'm way behind the times) and it is nice to avoid having duplicate build systems in the tree. Have you managed to solve the issue you're having yet? From looking at the FindwxWidgets.cmake file in my installation (old 2.8.12 on Linux) I think I can see what variables you would set to explicitly point it at a particular wx install, perhaps you just need to do that? This is how I used to work when I had to deal with libraries that CMake had no way of guessing where they might be installed. I suppose that if you're using mingw or msys packages it should be able to guess for you just like on Linux (not sure if you need an MSYS version of CMake for that or not), but I haven't had any experience with that on Windows.

[ruben_balea]

By following this guide I was able to compile PCem on both MSYS2 MinGW 32 and MSYS2 MinGW 64
It works with Make:

Code: Select all

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -G "MSYS Makefiles" -DUSE_NETWORKING=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make

And user shermanp found the way to do it also with Ninja:

Code: Select all

mkdir build && cd build
cmake -G Ninja -DMSYS=TRUE -DUSE_NETWORKING=ON -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release..
ninja

Find all the details in this post: https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=3725

[omarsis81]

I'm very happy to see PCem back again and welcome Michael Manley.
This is the best way to end this 2021

[PUERTOSERIAL]

Great News! PCEM is a fantastic project

[terub56]

Nice to see PCem is back again.

Thanks SarahWalker and MichaelJManley!

[tk421]

Welcome MichaelJManley!

Thank you Sarah for making PCem one of the best programs out there. My productivity with computers has improved immensely as a result of using PCem, a valuable tool not only for playing win95/98 games but also for any program compatibility task that uses software from 20-30 years ago.

It is nice to see the forum back and active once again. The forum has been a great way to learn more about PCem and how best to use it on a modern PC. Hopefully CPUs will improve sufficiently in 2022 to make emulating a PII 450 and the Celeron 533 an easy task. The PII 450 works quite well with Jedi Knight in-game, holding 100% performance almost throughout gameplay.

PCem is an amazing program and Sarah is one of the best software developers.

Happy New Year!

tk421

[Neville]

Fantastic news! Not that PCem needs much more IMHO. There's better PC Booter compatibility, and... No, that's all.

[Katakis]

Welcome back, PCem!

[Xanarki]

Thanks to Sarah for allowing the project to continue, and for sticking around a little bit. Advisory never hurts.

Michael, appreciate you stepping up and taking over. In 2020, Sarah had created a topic about which GPUs were of importance. Since you're a different person and have different opinions, I think it'd be cool if you could do the same, but with your own view. Obviously, nothing past the '90s, but early 3D cards like Rendition, Number Nine, Matrox, etc. Even if none of them gets implemented this year (or at all), I think it'd be interesting to see your opinion.

[Keatah]

Love it! Can't wait to see where PCem goes next.