286/386sx Emulator

[sh191976]

I`m sure someone must have already asked about this one but I cant find any reference, but given the excellent job of emulating the atari st and other machines I would expect a 286 or 386sx could be emulated. the gp32 seems like an ideal candidate as most systems of this era had 4mb or less memory and a suitable sized hard disk image could easily fit on an smc.
Speed, for me, would not be so much of an issue as I am mainly interested in strategy games such as masters of orion, railroad tycoon (both run at a resolution of 320x240 or 320x200) and possibly, performance allowing, UFO.

does anyone think its possible, I have no coding ability whatsoever

Cheers in advance, Ste

 

[MIK]

i think you need to emulate dos btw to rewrite dos that it works with the hardware of the gp.
about this topic are some threats avaiable i think.

 

[ravuya]

The processor emulation is definitely possible. The question is then whether or not we can do a reasonable job of porting the rest of the hardware emulation (video, sound, etc) over as well.

A port of DOSBox would be fairly reasonable (albeit horrendously slow); it's SDL-based and has the necessary bits for partially-accurate DOS emulation.

 

[MIK]

isn't it easier to port openDOS?

 

[washo]

dosbox cant even run correctly for games such as settlers 2 on a 2GHz pentium4 CPU with GFX card...stop freaming about that...
BTW: about 10 topics are already dealing about that...and all reported the same results: IMPOSSIBLE (or not reasonably possible)

see you :lol:

 

[MegatronUK]

isn't it easier to port openDOS?

​

OpenDos is just an replacement for MS-Dos/DR-Dos etc... it doesn't do any emulation [you still need the right hardware to run it on]... it's a bit like if there was a free, fully compatible, open-source version of Windows.

 

[MIK]

isn't it easier to port openDOS?

​

OpenDos is just an replacement for MS-Dos/DR-Dos etc... it doesn't do any emulation [you still need the right hardware to run it on]... it's a bit like if there was a free, fully compatible, open-source version of Windows.

​

Jeha i know, but isn't it possssible to add to the source of opendos the hardware of the gp? then you didn't emulate dos, you run dos for real.

 

[MegatronUK]

Unfortunately not. Most, if not all Dos games talk to the hardware directly... thats direct to the CPU, video card, sound card etc.. The right hardware would just *not* be there if you tried to run any MS-Dos aplications or games.
To accomplish what you propose, you would also have to convert and port every application you then wanted to run on this 'GP32-Dos' system.

To play and games you need to have, at the lowest level, an emulation of the x86 instruction set and registers with, optionally, emulation of x87 maths coprocesor.

You would need to emulate the memory interface.

You would need to emulate the chips of a typical sound card (adlib or soundblaster; tied into the GP32 sound sdk)

You would need to emulate an x86 system BIOS.

You would need to provide a low level IO interface to the SMC device, and turn it into an INT13 compatible hard disk device.

.... and ... and ... you get the picture

THEN, on top of all that, you run DOS... THEN on that you run your applications. But as I said, some applications and games talk directly to the hardware, bypassing DOS, so having a native GP32-DOS implemenation is no good. You need all the infrastructure below DOS to be able to run anything.

 

[MIK]

allrigth i see

 

[Shirohagen]

Just port Colonization, then we won't need a DOS emulator!

®

 

[MIK]

you can lay civ on the SNES. So e don't need a port.

 

[Shirohagen]

An astute plan with just two minor drawbacks...

1. Civ is not Colonization
2. Civ is not Colonization

Now I realise that's technically one drawback but it was such a big one it was worth mentioning twice.

Seriously though, I was only joking. There is a potential Colonization 2 project underway anyway...

DosBox works well on my Mac and to be honest I only really use it to play quite old PC games, I'm not that interested in trying anything modern enough for DosBox not to manage, so with those more modest hopes in my mind I'm still crossing my fingers for a GP32 DosBox or similar. Remember they all said GBA was impossible but we only comparitively recently saw miracles happen with that so I would never say never! I'm no coder but I'm sure someone who is could apply some twisted lateral thinking to it and suprise us, even if it is an engine which only runs Colonization I'd be happy.



®

 

[generalnmx]

x86 emulator is possible, but porting DOS is a different story One is a processor, the other is an operating system

 

[MIK]

An astute plan with just two minor drawbacks...

1. Civ is not Colonization
2. Civ is not Colonization

Now I realise that's technically one drawback but it was such a big one it was worth mentioning twice.

Seriously though, I was only joking. There is a potential Colonization 2 project underway anyway...

DosBox works well on my Mac and to be honest I only really use it to play quite old PC games, I'm not that interested in trying anything modern enough for DosBox not to manage, so with those more modest hopes in my mind I'm still crossing my fingers for a GP32 DosBox or similar. Remember they all said GBA was impossible but we only comparitively recently saw miracles happen with that so I would never say never! I'm no coder but I'm sure someone who is could apply some twisted lateral thinking to it and suprise us, even if it is an engine which only runs Colonization I'd be happy.



®

​

uh...my fault

it looks like that i can't read......

 

[Quiest]

you can lay civ on the SNES. So e don't need a port.

​

uh...my fault

it looks like that i can't read......

​

...and write.

 

[Blah]

I had a thought...

x86 = SISC
ARM = RISC

RISC = REDUCED INSTRUCTION SET
SISC = HUGE INSTRUCTION SET

Chock up another one for IMPOSSIBLE.

 

[ColinR]

I had a thought...

x86 = SISC
ARM = RISC

RISC = REDUCED INSTRUCTION SET
SISC = HUGE INSTRUCTION SET

Chock up another one for IMPOSSIBLE.

​

Firstly, it's CISC (standing for Complex Instruction Set Computing), and secondly, C/R has nothing to do with it. 68K uses Complex methods, and you have Castaway.

Risc chips are ideal for performing emulation (because the instruction set is so stripped down you can do the work you need to do and nothing more). But the complexity of programming in ASM makes the effort/performance ratio pretty low.

Chalk up another one for mis-informed.


Doesn't the Arc have a opensource PC emu? We used to have 68K emulation running on PC emulation running on Sun hardware at university (as a matter of course for every practical lesson in Computer Hardware iirc)

 

[ravuya]

I still maintain that it is technically possible to write an emulator for the x86, but as for whether or not someone will spend the time to do so when all anyone will say is "OMFG it doesn't run {Windows Game}" is up for discussion.