PCTask vs PCx vs Emplant e586 what is the best PeeCee emulator

[B00tDisk]

What is the best software PeeCee emulator???

PCTask, PCx, Emplant e586(I know this used the emplant board for timing, but the x86 code was still emulated) or other(not including bridgeboards).

My personal experience is primarily with hardware emulators, bridgeboard which are not really emulators, more or less real PeeCees on a board and mac emulators.  I have alot of experience with Jim Drew's Mac emulators (ie emplant, emplant pro, and Fusion) all which I love, but these don't need the CPU to be emulated.

Are any of these fast enough and accurate enough to be useful let us say with a fast CPU expansion like the vampire?

Here's a video (albeit not a good one) of Descent 1 and Doom 1 running on an A600 with Vampire, from about summer of last year.  Doom runs better than Descent, but neither one exactly flies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8RPyupsfUk

Another, this one showing Windows 3.1.  Performance is markedly better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MW22WqZLTMQ

Magic Carpet, also through PC-Task.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QQuEqSejPw - it's not awful, but there's better ways to play it...!

Windows '95:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5cxaiXI3c

From the video description:

"The speed corresponds to a real 386 SX cca. 33 MHz, but in many operations it is even slower. Of course for real use it is still not enough. Tested with resolutions 640x480 and 800x600 both in 16 colours. In 256 colours show the famous blue screen of death."

Finally, here's some positivity: X-Wing for the Mac, being emulated in ShapeShifter on a Vampire.  Looks as good as it ever did on a well-specced PC of the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xUsHhACfwA

[B00tDisk]

There's actually 2 different versions of Dosbox for 68k Amiga. Novacoders AGA 0.74 version and an older RTG/0.58 version.
The older version is temperamental though. When it works it works fine, but it often crashes when 1st launched. Setting a large stack improves things a little, but doesn't guarantee it won't crash.

I've not used the emplant emu, but my experience with the others is there's no best as such, they all have pros and cons and different software will favor one over another.

I think until 68k FPGAs get stronger you're still going to be out of luck for robust x86 emulation on the Amiga in pure software.  Even so, it isn't just a matter of grunt, but rather what's being emulated, and the emulation software itself.  There's no sources available for PC-Task (or PC-x) and they're not actively being developed any longer - DOSBox is seeing some progress, but that's a horse of another color: it is purely for DOS Emulation although with some pluck you can get ancient versions of Windows (1, 2, 3, 3.1, 3.11 and '95) running on it.

A full-featured tool like perhaps Bochs is what you'd want if you want to do more than noodle around with old DOS games and a shaky install of Windows...if it's a larger library of older albeit more widely known productivity apps you're after I think the best emulation experience on the Amiga (in pure software) is MacOS through Fusion or ShapeShifter.

[B00tDisk]

That's great!
I'm just wondering how usable it is today.
Roughly 15 years ago I ran PCx on an 060@50mHz and used M$-Dos and Win3.1 with it.
IIRC, it was not possible to run later versions of Windows, although the old HAAGE & PARTNER Amiga page says it would support the Pentium instruction set.
With a Pentium cpu @233mHz and 64mB RAM (better a Pentium@300+mHz with 128+mB RAM) it should be possible to run Win XP.
.

Dude I don't know if you're kidding or not, I think you need to step back from the idea of a usable XP environment on a 233mhz CPU and 64mb RAM.  The lowest spec machine I would even attempt to run XP (without adding the service packs, mind you) on would be in the 500mhz range with 256mb RAM.  And even then, only to say "Okay, it boots up".  Once you start adding service packs to fix the various problems it has (like, security issues), that overhead goes way, way up.  You might run XP on those specs, but you won't run any programs in XP.

[B00tDisk]

Today, its just for nostalgia.  It's not fast enough (even on a Vampire) for any serious work.  It runs Windows 3.1 just fine, and probably could run Windows 95... but that's it.  Later versions of Windows expected newer architecture and won't run.

That's not true.  I don't make promises about software.  I was stating what was planned.  We did work on a PPC version of PCx briefly, and a version of PCx was released for the Mac and PowerMac.  When iFUSION was sold to Blittersoft (along with source code, etc.) I completely abandoned PPC.  I think it's the worst CPU ever made.  IBM conned Apple into using it originally, and they finally got smart and switched to something much faster.  I was stunned when I heard that the next generation Amiga was going to be PPC based.  What a mistake that was.  That limited the sheer number of people who could have been exposed to the great Amiga OS.  Had the next generation Amiga gone x86 based, it would be at least (if not more so) popular as Linux is today.

I can't speak to various expansion manufacturers but I think a lot of the user-base back then was "Anything but x86", so by that logic PPC was "good" and x86 was "bad", and what they didn't get was that Motorola's tradition of not supporting previous architectures and instruction sets in follow-on CPUs meant that the PPC was just as alien as an x86 system would have been.  PPC was no magical device that granted some kind of purity to the Amiga's legacy.  It hampered and crippled it.

But we are wandering far afield.