PC Emulation

[Angus]

Hi,

I've been looking at emulation a bit recently, and as well as putting together a Shapeshifter/Fusion partition for Mac stuff, I want to try something similar with PCX/PC Task for the (stinking) pc.

I know what you're thinking......   :-)

Its going to be slow. Anyway, I want to try getting some really old games running, that hopefully won't be too worried about the speed of the emulation.

I gather I need a file called MSDOS.something or other. Is that something I can get from a modern pc, or possibly a Windows '98 startup floppy?

Thanks for any advice.

[Thomas]

I don't know if Win98 works on PCTask, but Win95 does. However, it is *really* slow (4 hours to install, 30 Minutes to boot).

You should get a full set of installation disks of DOS 6.2 or Windows 3.1. This is quite usable on PC-Task.

PCX is nice to try once but for every day use PC-Task 4.4 is the only choice IMHO.

And of course you need a 68060 accelerator. Any slower processor does not allow to run anything useful on a PC emulator.

Bye,
Thomas

[fx]

Hi,

To just boot into DOS you can just format a floppy on the PC and transfer the system to it, this is done by typing "sys a:" (if a: is your diskdrive, ofcourse). This does however not work on anything newer than Windows 98 (well, perhaps also with Windows ME?).

If you want to make a partition on the Amiga for use with PC-Task/PCX you need fdisk to partition it to a format the PC can understand.

[fx]

Thomas wrote:

And of course you need a 68060 accelerator. Any slower processor does not allow to run anything useful on a PC emulator.

I don't fully agree on this, if it's just to play some really old DOS games a slower processor may work pretty well. Some EGA and CGA games runs pretty well on my 040/40.

But ofcourse, the faster processor the better.

[Angus]

I have a pc in the house, and I keep a 98 system floppy with that for making partitions and using ghost.exe. Would that floppy have the necessary files on it?

If it does I guess I could e-mail them to the Amiga, or would I need to format a 720k floppy for the Amiga using crossdos, and install them that way?

I'm obviously a bit confused about this.

[Wayne]

Angus,

PCtask 4.4 is the best option
lot of games work there
for example I remember tested Wolfestein,monkey island and doom,legend of kyrandia and all worked
however I recommend at least a 040 and a gfx card for speed

btw, anyone here have tryed pctask under winuae?

Im asking now how fast and how good it can be there
under winuae
Pctask can be an alternative of DOSBOX for windows
who knows I will try that later


bye ,Laser

[Jiffy]

As there's some talk about PC-Task & stuff overhere I'ld like to budge in...

Is there anyone with a manual of PC-Task and/or a link on how to setup a partition on my Amiga for use with PC-Task? When I bought my original(!) PC-Task disks about two years ago from Softhut, there was no manual included. Not on disk and certainly not in any physical form. Not having a partition to run/install DOS-programs on really hinders the usability... ;-)

[zipper]

There's Pc-Task_guide in Aminet but I didn't check how good it is.

[InTheSand]

btw, anyone here have tryed pctask under winuae?

Err.. Yes!  :-D

Had to give it a go, mainly because it's on my (real) A1200 and was transferred to WinUAE when I duplicated its setup on the PC.

Unfortunately, all I get is a visit from the Guru... That's using 68040 CPU emulation and JIT... I might try a few other settings to see what happens...

But you really don't want to run a PC emulation within an Amiga emulation!!! VMWare, QEmu or DOSBox make far better environments for running older PC stuff on a PC!

 - Ali

EDIT: Doesn't seem to matter what I try, JIT on/off, 68020 through 68040, and either the interpretive or dynamic versions of PC Task, I get an illegal instruction Guru...

[Wayne]

jiffy,

send me a mail and I will reply u  with the manual of pctask 4.4.....aldozx@yahoo.es


inthesand,

vmware is very buggy under dos..games crash or not run at all...virtualpc is the same thing

of course DOSBOX is great and is the best....but I remember that PCtask was great and could play various dosgames on my a1200 040 /AGA...at descent speed
Imagine now on winuae with a fast 68k emulation and a gfx card...it can be very fast

btw,pctask here here is working under winuae....it boots perfect and using p96 uae gfx card but I can't initialize any emulation without a catweasel pci card...so

anyone can here send me a small pctask hardfile to initialize emulation under winuae?


bye,Laser

[recidivist]

 I am awed by the code writing ability of those emulator authors but wonder if the energy isn't misdirected now.
  Very capable Mac and IBM-compatibles can be had cheaply,and for some years the monitors have been the same. So simply put the "other" computers under or over countertop and use a switchbox for the monitor.You can hardly hope to emulate a Pentium 3 800 mhz on the Amiga but you can buy one for $50 or less ,same with a nice 233-333 iMac.

 Now what I think would be GREAT is an Amiga "emulator" running on a iMac PPC  hitting the hardware! After all if linux is an alternative on an iMac ,and it is,I have ubuntu 6 on my $40 ex-university one.(Tehy cleaned the hard drive of even the MacOS before selling it,which is common these days.

 If no legal Amiga OS4 can be licensed for such things,can a BSD/linux based Amiga emulation be used if one has/buys Amiga forever to get the legal ROM imsage? Or if one owns an older Amiga?I  am imaging my A3000 and/or A1200 features and functions running on a machine with 10 times the processor speed and 20 times the memory without going broke.

 Has it already been done? I DON"T mean something running  as a MACOS task but installed from a cd as did  ubuntu linux. I wonder how much faster and better UAE would run if it didn't have to run on top of Windows. Or do I misunderstand how it works?

[recidivist]

 Sorry for poor spelling,I should have checked it first.

[_ThEcRoW]

You have amigaos booting directly in your pc with Amiga Forever. It uses the Amiga emulation on top of a live-cd linux distro called kx-light.
Similar to amithlon, but with custom chip emulation :-D

[Angus]

So gents,
I'm confused - when they say that PC-Task or PCX needs MSDOS or equivalent to run, is that basically the contents of a 98 system floppy?

I have one of these and the listing is below - thanks for any further advice.

ATTRIB.EXE    15252 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
CD1.SYS       34262 26-Sep-96  5:13:04p ----rw-d
CD2.SYS       16504 21-Nov-96  1:54:00a ----rw-d
CD3.SYS       19984 13-Aug-96  1:03:02a ----rw-d
CD4.SYS       41302 11-May-98  8:01:00p ----rw-d
CHKDSK.EXE    28096 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
DELTREE.EXE   19083 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
DISPLAY.SYS   17175 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
EDIT.COM      69902 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
EDIT.HLP      10790 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
EXTRACT.EXE   93242 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
FDISK.EXE     63916 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
FIND.EXE       6658 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
FORMAT.COM    49575 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
HIMEM.SYS     33191 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
IEXTRACT.EXE  17655 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
LABEL.EXE      9324 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
MEM.EXE       32146 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
MOVE.EXE      27299 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
MSCDEX.EXE    25473 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SCANDISK.EXE 143818 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SCANDISK.INI   7329 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SCANREG.EXE  165502 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SMARTDRV.EXE  45379 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
SYS.COM       18967 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
XCOPY.EXE      3878 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
XCOPY32.EXE    3878 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d
XCOPY32.MOD   41472 23-Apr-99 10:22:00p ----rw-d

[drHirudo]

I am awed by the code writing ability of those emulator authors but wonder if the energy isn't misdirected now.
Very capable Mac and IBM-compatibles can be had cheaply,and for some years the monitors have been the same. So simply put the "other" computers under or over countertop and use a switchbox for the monitor.You can hardly hope to emulate a Pentium 3 800 mhz on the Amiga but you can buy one for $50 or less ,same with a nice 233-333 iMac.

Indeed a second machine is very cheap, but sometimes emulation is better choise, especially for some obscure machines like the Atari ST. I used to have Atari MegaSTE for some time and it was rubbish. It came with Black&White monitor on which the games didn't work, because they needed color monitor, the hard disk was small (easily solvable), but the transfer of files to it was pain. I am glad that I got rid of it pretty fast. Now with emulation I simply download Atari files to my Amiga hard disk, and run them under Hatari, plus when I need to take screenshot, I simply grab the window/screen contents. I also used to have PC before, but it was mostly sitting idle, wasting electricity, or leeching files off edonkey, while for some games it's better under emulation, sharing the same monitor, hard drive, Joystick, Audio Speakers and desktop, where all Amiga stuff is located.
Pros are that I don't need monitor/Keyboard/Joystick/Audio Speakers switch/es, I simply press Amiga+M and have the Atari or PC, or the others computers experience, if they aren't on Windows in the Workbench. Cons are that the current highend Amigas aren't that fast so you can't expect that fast emulated machines as well, but for most previous to 1991th year retroplatforms the A1 is okay.