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

[Motormouth]

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?

[Motormouth]

Oh, there is one more software PeeCee software emulator DOSBOX for amiga.  I had no idea that there was a DOSbox version for the Amiga.

@B00tDisk
These are useful videos!!!!
The Amiga ports of DOOM and Descent for the amiga appear to be the way to go!!!!

[Motormouth]

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.

Alas,  It looks like I will stick to my Bridgeboard for PC emulation, not a bad problem to have, but it does effect what amiga the vampire goes into when it eventually gets here.  I am leaning heavily toward the A2000 rather than my A500+.  This is primary due to the expansion cards.  Things like the bridgeboard and an A2065.

I cannot wait to see how the vampire will cut through Fusion..........   Will the vamp in an amiga + fusion or shapeshifter be the fastest 680x0 mac out there.  I think youtube videos already show this!!!!!

@Jim Drew don't worry I will be using fusion with an Emplant board :-)

[Motormouth]

It looks as if quite a few of you have experience with PC-Task......
I tried it may may years ago, but this was an early version.  I do remember I could get it to work with the picasso II at the time, with I could not with Emplant e586, using the pre-cybergraphx (obvious also pre-picasso96)  rtg drivers that came with the picasso II.

I find it interesting that the tomb raider results on the native 68060 80Mhz is significally faster than the vampire.

Is the JIT aided by the MMU or FPU?     Does tomb raider perhaps use the FPU calls to accelerate graphics, how is PC-task 80486 FPU emulated via?  perhaps 68882 compatible code?

[Motormouth]

I stayed with PcTask for a while and then got me a Vortex AtOnce286 classic.
This gave me the best experience so far and I used it a lot with M$-Dos, Word v4/4.5/5, DBase, Fortran77 and QuickBasic. I could even run a Windows version for 286 cpus in monochrome mode.

I have a GVP PC 286 which is  basically a Vortex AtOncePlus.  It actually work fairly well especially for CPU bound tasks as it has a real 80286.  There is for one "major" problem.   The video is very slowwwwwwww.  It uses the amiga's hardware to emulate the video.  I noticed you had to use monochrome mode.....  I had 3.11 (not with workgroups ie needs a 386) running with monochrome Olivetti video.   I found the video updates slowly.  

Further GVP PC 286 does not work with the VXL 030, (I only had a GVP A500 HD8+ but obviously works with the GVP A530).  I wonder if work with the vampire.   The vampire should surely improve the video emulation speed assuming it is compatible.

[Motormouth]

Thx for the info!

Did he also mention which Amiga-cpus/AOS-versions the updated versions will support?

I mean - back then a WOS Version of PcX was promised.
Precondition for the development being the ownership of FusionPPC.
I bought Fusion PPC back then, but PcX PPC was never ever released.
:angry:
Should I now - one and a half decades later - finally be able to get my WOS PCX Version?
:rolleyes:

ditto +1,  I agree, I have always liked Jim Drew work!   He does come onto Amiga.org occasionally.  It would be fun to talk to him again about emulation!!!!!

[Motormouth]

I plan on releasing the PCx and FUSION (both optimized for the Vampire boards) when I get a chance.

I think will all are looking forward to this............:-)

Just curious.  forgive me if this is a sensitive subject, but How would you handle the purchase/ distribution of a Vampire optimized version,  I for one would be willing to pay you for your hard work!!!   (I bought emplant, emplant pro, e586, fusion and PCx)   Also would you still allow access to the emplant board for better compatibility? ie if the vamp 500 is in a 2000 or an a500 with a zorroII to 68 pin adapter.

[Motormouth]

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.

In so far as PC emulation even a 486slc bridgeboard could barely run windows 95.  If you could get PCx to run Windows 95 with something like a 1024x768x256 color display from the vamp's video out that would be actually quite awesome.

As for Fusion I would image you could get it to just fly, perhaps the fastest 680x0 mac ever ?? (I know this is a bold statement).  But Fusion V3.2 with an emplant board and voodoo3 graphics on my A4000/040/25mhz is already the fastest classic 680x0 mac I have, expect for my 33Mhz 68040 Quadra 950.  MacOS 8.1 (which is know to be slow) runs just fine on it.

[Motormouth]

I've got the GoldenGate 486slc 50MHz bridge board card with the 387 maths co-processor & FDC chips installed (with the optional Monitor Master), ISA video card, & an ISA network card in my A4000.  I've also got Windows 98 installed on it.  It runs a whole lot faster than PC-Task 4.4 or PCx.  I would say that I does run at an acceptable level for the CPU it has on the bridge board.  I think that by having an ISA video card, the speed increases.

On another note: I had installed Windows95 on PC-Task ver. 4.4 on my NTSC A1200 with a Blizzard 1260 CPU accelerator.  You need the patience of a saint to complete the installation.  It took several hours to complete.  I wanted to install Windows98 on my A1200, but never got around to doing so.  You need to enter some parameters to install it so that it bypasses some stuff, which I've forgotten now.  I'd have to review that to remember what it was, but W98 could definitely be installed on PC-Task ver. 4.4.  W98 is the latest & last version that I know of that could be installed on PC-Task ver. 4.4.

I have a similar setup A2386sx upgraded to 486slc3 75mhz, 387, cardinal VGA/SCSI/Audio board, ISA ethernet, and Kurwell IDE/SERIAL/Parallel board in a A2000 with all the ISA slots upgraded to 16 bit.

The 486slc is basically,  386sx on with 486 instruction set and bigger cache on a 16 bit bus / 32 internal.  Most were frequency double or even tripled.  This chip is quite nice when compared to a 386sx, but it really cannot hold a candle to the 486DX or DX2/DX4.  

By the time Windows 95 came out Pentiums 100mhz+ were out.

Windows 95 (which needs a 386 min) and Windows 98 (which needs a 486 min) will certainly install on these configurations, but alas they are already slow by the time windows 95 came out.  Certainly you could do regular "windows" tasks with these configuration, but certainly not any real gaming or anything too taxing.

An example of a test I did, this was in the late 90' something like 97.  I bought warcraft package with warcraft one, warcraft II , and the warcraft II expansion.  What was nice about warcraft series is that they were on hybrid disks, that could be install on both a PC or a mac.   I ran warcraft II, (a SVGA game) on my (at that time) A3000/040 25 mhz both with the with the A2386 with the 486slc3 bridgeboard and on the I think either emplant pro or an early version of fusion.  Warcraft II installed on the A2386 486slc configuration side but was so slow that is was basically unplayable.  whereas on the mac side of this the game played smoothly.  The full 68040 consider roughly equivalent to the 80486DX (I know we could get into a lot of controversy with this statement, but is not the point of this reply.)  I am not going to pretend that this was a accurate test, but roughly a practical comparison.  

Now as for the original warcraft, both ran smoothly.

It is my opinion  (opinions are a dime a dozen) that the 486slc bridgeboards (with a VGA card) make a super windows 3.11 with workgroups computers and can handle games from from the early 90's extremely well.  It can run windows 95/98 and do basic tasks well enough, but choke when you throw anything semi hard at them.  Eitherway it is fun just trying to get them to work with either configuration.

My friends thought it was just crazy that my A3000 could run AmigaOS, Windows 95 (yes I has 95 on it to show off), MacOS (probably 7.6.3 at the time), and NetBSD. It was nice to have this configuration at this time as I was a graduate student.  In trying to write my thesis I needed data from MatLab (primarily a mac product at the time), early dos data acquisition computers, Mac office computers, and Sun Unix workstations.  It was also nice having NetBSD for its LaTeX support as many theses were written in TeX at the time.

[Motormouth]

I have an Emplant.  Thanks to this thread I have moved "get Emplant working with MacOS and DOS" closer to the top of my TO-DO list.

As far as the emplant, The PAL chipe were upgraded with the emplant software updates.  a couple were changed out with the upgrade from the emplant to emplant pro software then then a couple more were changed with the upgrade to e586.......

You might want to check your board.  

@Jim Drew, how do you tell which version of pal chips in the emplant board