DOS and Windows emulation and gaming

[Wizzard]

I tried Recalbox on PBP, but I think the best system to emulate on PBP is DOS and maybe Windows, because of its form factor. We have a keyboard, what is all we need for DOS games and dont need any additional gamepad.

I installed Dosbox and later Dosbox SVN and the games run very well (using the latest Auyfan's Ubuntu 20.04 with KDE Plasma)

Tried Bolo, Tomb Raider, Quake, Duke3D and some older games.

I had to set Dosbox to scale to full screen and enable openGl and also tweak number of CPU cycles that Dosbox tries to emulate each millisecond. When setting to 100000, all the SVGA games run smoothly, but not so fast, so I also added frameskip=1.

It was even possible to install Windows 98, but it does not run stable. There are still some problems after booting so it is not usable yet. If anyone was able to install and run Win98, please let me know, how to do it.

[jiyong]

I installed QEMU, Virtlib and VM Manager (virt-manager) and Windows XP PE.
But it was really slow.

I have also installed the following emulators:
Stella (Atari 2600)
MAME (Old Arcade machines)
SCUMM https://www.scummvm.org/ (also has a couple of games for download)

[xmixahlx]

anyone try emulationstation ot similar frontend?

[Wizzard]

I installed QEMU, Virtlib and VM Manager (virt-manager) and Windows XP PE.
But it was really slow.

I installed Windows 98 in QEMU, but is it not fast and I dont have network and also have only VGA via VNC.
Are you able to configure better video driver and enable network? I let everything at defaults.

[jiyong]

When you create the VM, at one point you can open "Network selection".
Choose "Host Device".
I didn't test it, as I don't have the patience to wait until IE starts. ;-)

[Wizzard]

Will check it, but is there any way how to enable some video acceleration? I guess this is not possible because of VNC/SPICE display.

[2pointohhhh]

Interesting, because I tried installing DOSBox on my PBP and tried running the setup for Heroes of Might & Magic 2 (specifically the DOS version since there is also a Windows setup from GOG) and it said it had to be run on an x86 platform. I'll admit that I am not very familiar with DOSBox but I'm not sure what I did wrong, if anything. 

And yes, I made sure that I had the offline installer and not the one that includes GOG Galaxy.

[manawyrm]

If anyone was able to install and run Win98, please let me know, how to do it.

I used an emulator called "PCem". I had to compile it from source (from a mercurial repo   ), but it works pretty well (~90 MHz Pentium). 
Windows 98 works, sound and graphics work.

[Wizzard]

Okay, it works, thanks! Video and sound driver works too. Just does not hear any sound and the speed is not great, but much better than QEMU and more stable than Dosbox

@manawyrm btw, does it really run like P90? When I try to emulate P75, it never runs at 100 percent speed. Do you run it on Manjaro?

[manawyrm]

does it really run like P90

Hm, that's a good question. I fiddled around a bit with the compile settings to get it to maximum speed (arch native, O3, etc.).
It stuttered a bit in the installation, but when using it (my workload was Visual Basic 4.0  ) it seemed to work at full speed. Maybe it's different for gaming workloads where there's a lot of dynamic recompilation needed.  (also make sure the PBP doesn't get too hot and throttle)

(and yes, I'm using Manjaro, too)