CD-Rom Player on PCem

[Jonathan McEvoy]

I have been using PCem and whenever I load the disc on my drive it would lag my PCem and would run more slowly then using ISO or Cue image and is there going to be another version of future updates that could remove the lag on PCem when using CD-Rom Player?

[unreal9010]

Unfortunately not. It is recommended to use image files only.

[tk421]

I think virtual CDs are the best way to use CDs with PCem. You will get very fast performance and with the Voodoo 2/3 it will look better than most Pentium PCs back in the day.

One option would be to place your CD ISO within a PCem virtual hard disk and run Daemon Tools from within a PCem VM. I do this for some of my games and it is the only way to run them with a virtual CD.

Daemon Tools will even work with a P166 MMX.

[wishusknight]

I think virtual CDs are the best way to use CDs with PCem. You will get very fast performance and with the Voodoo 2/3 it will look better than most Pentium PCs back in the day.

One option would be to place your CD ISO within a PCem virtual hard disk and run Daemon Tools from within a PCem VM. I do this for some of my games and it is the only way to run them with a virtual CD.

Daemon Tools will even work with a P166 MMX.

I have even had luck using deamon tools on the host to pass DVD's to PCEM without any actual slowdown. But they were to lower power vm's in PCEM like 386's and such.I have not tried higher spec vm's, but I imagine that is where the issues start cropping in even with host mounted iso's.

Passing through the physical drive is always a rough experience though. I actually even have performance issues using MUNT for external midi emulation.

[uVSthem]

Does anyone know what the reason for the lag is when passing through the host's optical drive? Is it just a matter of needing a more powerful host machine?

[Sooga]

Does anyone know what the reason for the lag is when passing through the host's optical drive? Is it just a matter of needing a more powerful host machine?

That's been my 1 million silver rupee question that nobody seems to be able to answer. I think it's some kind of quirk in the coding that's frankly nobody has time or energy or care to look into. They'll probably look into it as soon as Xenia can emulate Forza Horizon 1 without a bunch of missing textures and random crashes after the 1st race. Not sure which scenario is more likely to happen!

[JosepMa]

I haven't seen the exact part of the code, but my thoughts on the problems when interacting with physical (instead of virtual) devices comes from the fact that the emulation stops until it receives the response. This, to the emulator, is interpreted as not being fast enough to maintain the emulated speed, rather than just a wait on an I/O.
Basically, the emulator pretends to be be always running the CPU on a single thread, and peripherals run also on this thread because the CPU is waiting for the response and it is quite complicated to separate this to let the rest of the components to run.