v16 released!

[SarahWalker]

PCem v16 is now available. Changes from v15 :

• New machines added - Commodore SL386SX-25, ECS 386/32, Goldstar GDC-212M, Hyundai Super-286TR, IBM PS/1 Model 2133 (EMEA 451), Itautec Infoway Multimidia, Samsung SPC-4620P, Leading Edge Model M
• New graphics cards added - ATI EGA Wonder 800+, AVGA2, Cirrus Logic GD5428, IBM 1MB SVGA Adapter/A
• New sound card added - Aztech Sound Galaxy Pro 16 AB (Washington)
• New SCSI card added - IBM SCSI Adapter with Cache
• Support FPU emulation on pre-486 machines
• Numerous bug fixes
• A few other bits and pieces

[omarsis81]

*this* is really great news hehe

[MiraiMiracle]

Yes!! Thank you so much! I'm going to remove all of the machines from version 15 and update the program version to version 16! Thank you so much!!

[JosepMa]

Hi Sarah. You missed one place to change the version number, the about dialog. IIRC you missed that for v15 too and modified it in an Hex editor
(I also missed some places in my patch: https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3434 )

[SarahWalker]

There's an About dialog? Never knew that.

[omarsis81]

There's an About dialog? Never knew that.

Yes, in the Status screen go to Misc and there is the About diag... it currently says v14 lol

[Xanarki]

Always excited for a new version. Thanks to everyone that helped!

The lack of Mistique doesn't bother me much, but Sarah, if you had a personal preference for a different 3D card to work on, which would it be? Just curious.

[tk421]

I will test this exciting new version of PCem as soon as I can. PCem is an amazing program, well designed and built to last.

I can run so many old programs and games so easily and efficiently using PCem.

[Neville]

Very cool. I have a newbie question, though. Does the FPU for 386 / 486 computers affect in any way the gaming experience?

[Zilog]

Very Thanks Sarah for you Work!

Thanks Again!

[DSN]

Thanks!!!

[Katakis]

Thanks, Sarah.

[altheos]

Thanks for the release.

[abk4523]

A new version of PCEM? Sounds exiting!

Yes!! Thank you so much! I'm going to remove all of the machines from version 15 and update the program version to version 16! Thank you so much!!

I am curious about upgrading, Do you really need to remove and recreate machines or can you copy your current configs and use them in V16?

[Grassini]

Great work.
I know this is a detail but the version information in the PCem Machine window is old.

Adnotacja 2020-05-01 143933.jpg (41.67 KiB) Viewed 24526 times

[James-F]

Thank you!

IDE HDD emulation is still slow and stuttery as heck.

[omarsis81]

Thank you!

IDE HDD emulation is still slow and stuttery as heck.

With what games do you notice that stutter?

[James-F]

Duke Nukem 3D.
Start the game and watch the demo,, you will see stuttering when the HDD is accessed, plus the game takes a super long time to load.
This does not happen on a real IDE HDD on my Pentium machine (or DOSBox for that matter).
I'm testing this each new release for years now, and it's still not fixed.

https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=739

[SarahWalker]

You may have noticed there is no mention of performance improvements in the changes for this release. So this should not be a surprise.

[leilei]

Duke3D's always loaded long and stuttered like that on my old 486 hardware in pure DOS without any Smartdrv loaded with the whole on-demand loads common with all BUILD games benefiting from disk cache (it'd be more noticeably worse with Shadow Warrior and Blood)... My earlier dynarec performance testing with Duke3D earlier involved running it through Win9x where it's less of a problem. There's also no disk compression on the guest nor the host.

Heck, on modern hardware with modern operating systems playing modern source ports, you can still have the Duke3D hell loads and stutters with the high resolution packs.

[James-F]

I've mentioned it on the IDE HDD thread already, but when the game is run from a RAM drive it is flawless, like on my real Pentium 233 machine.
This is a major bottleneck, and does not behave like a period correct IDE HDD drive, please fix that.

[omarsis81]

I've mentioned it on the IDE HDD thread already, but when the game is run from a RAM drive it is flawless, like on my real Pentium 233 machine.
This is a major bottleneck, and does not behave like a period correct IDE HDD drive, please fix that.

So... you are playing Duke 3D on PCem on a Pentium 233? Under plain DOS? I'm going to make a time comparison between real hard and PCem

[James-F]

I've mentioned it on the IDE HDD thread already, but when the game is run from a RAM drive it is flawless, like on my real Pentium 233 machine.
This is a major bottleneck, and does not behave like a period correct IDE HDD drive, please fix that.

So... you are playing Duke 3D on PCem on a Pentium 233? Under plain DOS? I'm going to make a time comparison between real hard and PCem

Pretty much yes. You can go lower to Pentium 133.
There is no need for side by side comparison,, just look for stutters in thegameplay Demo right when the menu appears.
Hit Esc to close the menu and watch the gameplay Demo.

Also try XMSDSK.EXE to create a XMS RAM drive and copy Duke3D in there.
https://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22443
xmsdsk.exe 100000 z: /t /y
Make sure you have 128MB RAM emulated.
It's butter smooth from the RAM drive, like on the real machine.

This stuttering is happening because of heavy disk activity, I can see the disk activity indicator blinking rapidly during the start of the gameplay demo.
Not so prominent with other games, but Duke3D goes crazy with burst reading from the HDD.

[omarsis81]

Honestly, I don't see anything out of the extraordinary. I mean, the led HDD activity led stutters on real machines and takes the same time to load.
Of course on a RAM drive it would load quicker because RAM is faster than a mechanical HDD
Maybe what you want is the HDD to act a RAM drive to avoid loading times, but that's not real behavior

[te_lanus]

Pretty much yes. You can go lower to Pentium 133.
There is no need for side by side comparison,, just look for stutters in thegameplay Demo right when the menu appears.

I just tried and don't see any stutters. All I saw was the game loading data to ram and then running, and it didn't even took a few seconds ( about 2) which is normal. Running a game from ram will always outperform running it from hdd.

My emulated system:
[Socket 5] Intel Advanced/ZP Pentium 75
128mb ram
S3 Virge
2x500mb hdd
MS-Dos 5.0

[James-F]

Please read here, I think I found the problem.
https://pcem-emulator.co.uk/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&p=13813#p13813

[leilei]

For V16, a stock Raspberry Pi 4 can get 100% on Doom on a i486DX2/50, but can also attain 100% in Quake on AM486DX4-120 (and not much else at that speed)

[omarsis81]

That's great! I wish we could have an official Pi executable file for download in the future

[leilei]

Providing a binary wouldn't be necessary when it's pretty quite trivial to compile. It's not MAME. I believe apt-get installing the dependencies takes longer than to configure/make PCem v16.

Though if Raspbian had it in the repo, it'd probably be through Debian and debian downstream always makes security-minded changes, which (judging by how they treat DOSBox) would likely involve gutting the dynamic recompiler, so this is probably not what you want... and DFSG probably won't like it for the whole depend-on-copyrighted-roms-to-function aspect to include it right away anyhow.

[omarsis81]

leilei: the binary you compiled for the Pi was made to be executable under Raspberry Pi OS?