DOS and Windows emulation and gaming

[Wizzard]

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.).

I was just curious what kind of MB and CPU were you trying to emulate and what is the percent shown in the window title. When I try to emulate Shuttle MB with P75, it rarely goes to near 100 percent speed, mostly it is like 70-80 percent speed just when playing with the OS, not running any big application.

[pcx]

Anyone ran Steam yet? I wanna get the pine book pro but I do not think it
Can run my favorite game tf2(team fortress 2)

[rimaille]

Anyone ran Steam yet? I wanna get the pine book pro but I do not think it
Can run my favorite game tf2(team fortress 2)

You can run steam via box86
https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86

But, it need a 32 bits chroot to run, it cant run natively on aarch64, the architecture of pinebook pro.

And, even if steam can be launched, very painfull, you'll can't play tf2.

[Idaho]

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.

If you want to run Windows games, just use TwisterOS, it has box86 and wine, you can even run modern games with it, I got Guild Wars to run with barely any problems and Worms Armaggedon to work totally ok, Steam support is not yet here but it'll be here in the future... I think TwisterOS is the way to go for the pbpro in term of gaming... n64 emulation and PSP emulation is working as well...

[wpeckham]

I compiled PCEM from sources in Manjaro (2021-04-30 latests in the repos).  I tried the build from AUR ( which did NOT work saying the AARCH64 was not supported ) but it pulled the prerequisites for me,. Then I pulled the GIT sources for version 17 and they configured and compiled without error.  I was able to install floppy software (versions of DOS) and they ran very nicely on several machine emulations.  I was NOT able to get FreeDOS running, because I have it on an ISO image.  I could not get the CD-ROM support to work well enough to link up the ISO. 

If anyone has compiled PCEM on PBP and gotten the CD-ROM working, please let me know the trick! 

I am looking forward to running FreeDOS with the full games selection, and testing ReactOS in PCEM on PBP if I can get it working that far.

UPDATE: I have not gotten CD-ROM working.  I DID discover that if you have a legacy mode CD-ROM ISO file X.ISO and you rename it X.img it will load as a hard drive image if you are lucky.  I found a combination that it would work on, loaded the usb image of FreeDOS, and was able to do a full install to a blank vhd drive image that way.  

This will NOT work with the ReactOS 4.14 or daily images, as those are more modern and use compressed data that the PCEM drivers cannot seem to handle.

[wpeckham]

UPDATE: Having no problems with DOSBOX, I decided to play with DOSBOX-X and see what I could break.  The AUR image compiled just fine, and it starts up and logs as if it runs, but the display window never becomes visible.  Not sure what is up with that. 

DOSBOX runs all of my DOS games and programs well enough (except my BBS software), but DOSBOX-X also can run Win1-3 and Win95-ME software. Most of that stuff runs so light that it should perform well enough on the PBP. IF i can get it visible!  Opened an issue with the DOSBOX-X team and will update here if I get something worth reporting.

UPDATE: compiled the package against SDL2 instead of the SDL1 default, and it works great.  Recommended, esp if you happen to have old WinME image and programs lying around.