PC emulator?

Is there any sort of PC emulator for RISC OS 5 (Pi)? I don’t mean DOSBox, I’m looking for something that can actually boot up from a floppy image – it doesn’t need to be fancy, a bog standard 386/486 with VGA…

Does such a thing exist?

I’m only aware of DOSbox. We really need someone (ChrisG?) to port Bochs – C++ x86 emulator than can run XP given enough CPU oomph.

I’m not quite sure what happened to the PC Emulator – I suspect we probably own that, but I’ve never found sources. That was only 80286 I think, with EGA. There was also !FasterPC from APDL which I think could do some VGA but had other deficiencies that made it less useful (to me) overall.

However, AFAIK neither was made 32bit safe. Only DOSbox.

According to the PCEm 1.7 User Guide, it emulated an 80188 with EGA and EGA+ graphics.

Historically APDL FasterPC and Acorn PC Emulator both commercial.

There’s PC Engine by Paul Clifford but you’ll need to use wayback to touch that.

This is interesting “Experimental ARM and ARM64 host support”

and this is the Chris’s Acorns page including the PC_Emulator (as above) totally certain to be 26-bit, but I believe it’s a module and a frontend – might be interesting to see if it’s hackable to 32 bit (or maybe ROOL have the source in the back office somewhere)

Interesting that Chris’s info only goes up to PCem v1.82. There was a later version (1.86, I think) that was renamed PCSoft and updated for the RiscPC.

By the way, “PC Engine” is a games console using what is effectively a souped up 65C02 – https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TurboGrafx-16

PCEm works – at least to an extent – under ArcEm. However, that’s two layers so it’s a bit slow :)

Both FasterPC and Acorn’s !PCem emulated an 80188, so no “protected mode” stuff. FasterPC was faster for games-oriented graphics modes and had better sound emulation. This was mainly because of specific fast support for MCGA (256 colour 320×200). But classic bitplane modes of EGA and VGA were not supported. But there was support for special extendes CGA modes like “Tandy” which was used by some games.

CPU-wise, they were both similar in speed. I think only !PCem could run in a window, FasterPC was always full-screen. !PCem came with a licenced DR DOS, FasterPC didn’t come with DOS and was a lot cheaper.

See here for some info: http://www.apdl.org.uk/riscworld/volumes/volume3/issue2/fasterpc/index.htm

I don’t mean DOSBox, I’m looking for something that can actually boot up from a floppy image

Unless I’m misunderstanding, it seems like DOSBox is already capable of this.

DOSBox is good, with all the patches that make it be compatible with Win95/Win98.
The current RISC OS version is very slow, without a working dynamic recompiler.
Some work is needed. I could finance it, since I have no time to do it myself :)

Else, the best alternative is probable Qemu.

Runnubg Linux in dosbox , I need to try that!

DOSBox is quite capable of booting into any OS from a floppy Image or hard disk image.

I wasn’t aware of that. Since you mentioned it, I looked it up and found the Boot command.

MOUNT C /SDFS::RISCOSPi/$/Apps/Emulation/x86junk
C:
BOOT MICHALOS.IMG -l A

Sweet. ;-)

with all the patches that make it be compatible with Win95/Win98.

Not ours. And, AFAICR, not the original. I think it’s the fork DOSBOX-X that supports a sort-of file locking mechanism that is needed for later versions of Windows.
Heck, the one we have won’t even run Word in WfWG (as no SHARE.EXE support).

even FastDOSBox is a bit slow.

And needs alignment exceptions disabled.

Heck, the one we have won’t even run Word in WfWG (as no SHARE.EXE support).

Use fakeshare.

RISC OS Dosbox can and does run Windows 95/98 quite well, we have done it many times.

Yes, but the patches help to install them.