Use PCem to run your old games

First of all, PCem is a PC and compatible emulator. It's been created by Sarah Walker and can be downloaded from her homepage. It emulates exact models of personal computers, from the earliest 1981 IBM PC (with a 8088 CPU and CGA graphics) to Pentium class computers with SVGA graphics with or without 3Dfx acceleration.

PCem uses low level emulation and faithfully reproduces the behavior of these machines. Therefore, it shouldn't be your first option to run older PC games. On the other hand, it is a perfect solution for those interested in old hardware or who owned a PC during the 1980-90s and want to revive old times.

1) Requirements:

- A modern PC. If we plan to emulate 486 / Pentium class machines a Core Duo or better is recommended.

- Windows 7 or better. Linux and Macintosh are also supported, although you may need to compile the program yourselves in those cases.

- The BIOSes of some emulated machines. If you don't know where to start, try getting some IBM PC models from the complete MAME / MESS romset, together with the "IBM VGA Graphics Card" (pcvga.zip) file.

These roms need to be uncompressed and then copied to the folder PCem\Roms\PC_model , and the peripherals (these include videocards) in PCem\Roms\ .

- The program WinImage to manage our harddrive images. We'll use it to copy files to our harddrive image.

- OS Disk images. PCem supports FreeDOS, MS-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows XP.

OSes that boot from CD-ROM may need a startup disk. AllBootDisks keeps startup images for many OSes.

- Although they are not essential, you may need drivers for some of your peripherals, such as mouse, video or soundcards. The VOGONS community keeps a libray of those, the VOGONS Vintage Driver Library .

- Optionally, you may want to get the file BXIMAGE.EXE from BOCHS emulator . We'll use it to create harddrive images.

2) Creating and setting-up a new machine.

Now we're going to create our first machine, a PC clone with a 486/66 CPU, 16 Mb. RAM and a VGA video card.

1) First we create a harddrive image. This can be done from PCem itself, but personally I prefer to use BXIMAGE.EXE. The reason why is that until very recently PCem required you to manually enter certain parameters, and I found that a bit difficult:



We use these values, except for the final size. That's up to you. For a 486 class computer a 425 megabytes harddrive was of a decent size, but now this only depends on how much disk space you want to sacrifice and the number of programs you want to install.

2) We start PCem and hit on the button with the + sign to create a nerw machine. Available options may change according to the number of BIOses in the PCem\Roms folder.

Computer model, grouped by CPU (8088, 8086, etc.) class.



CPU & RAM settings... uncheck the "Dynamic recompiler" option if you can. This increases CPU usage, but gives you more compatibility.



videocard...



Sound devices (I)...



Sound devices (II)... you can leave this section blank.



...And finally, hard drive and floppy drive settings. Set up the path to your hard drive image here.

If we're going to use floppy drive images, make sure the floppy drives have the correct values. 5 ¼ drives won't be able to read 3 1/2 images, nor the other way around.



3) Setting up the PC BIOS.

Let's start our new machine for the first time:



Older PCs won't autodetect new hardware, so encountering error messages at this point is perfectly normal. In these case you need to enter the PC BIOS (normally rebooting the computer while pressing F1 or Del.) and perform a few tasks: a

a) Setting up our disk units.





We start by auto-detecting the hard drive(s). After this, we also make sure the floppy drives are set up properly. Otherwise, we may run into errors later while using floppy disk images.

If our hard drive is over 500 Mb. we may also need to activate the IDE LBA option.

b) We make sure the PC boots from units A:, D: and C:, in this order. A is our first floppy unit, D our CD-ROM drive (ONLY if we're installing Windows 95 or newer from CD) and C our hard drive.



c) We save the changes and leave:



4) Installing an OS on our harddrive.

As we've seen, PCem allows a wide variety of OSes to be installed in our machine. However, our OS must match our intentions and the emulated hardware. In our case, we have a 486/66 CPU and gaming in our mind, so we're installing the English version of MS-DOS 6.22.

So we start our machine with two disk images, the first MS-DOS floppy disk in A: and our harddrive in C:



Every OS has its own quirks, but essentially all we need to do is to follow the on-screen instructions. If we are prompted for extra disks, we can insert them using PCem menus:



Until the process eventually finishes:



From now on we can boot our machine from the hard drive. Other units are not really necessary, unless we need to copy / install programs from them.

5) Copying files to our hard drive.

Once our hard drive image has an OS installed, there are several ways of copying programs to it. For instance, you may use the OS tools to copy files from other hard drives, floppy disk images, or CD-ROM units.

An easier way of doing that is using an external program to access our hard drive. This is where WinImage proves its usefulness.

This program allows us, among other things, to drag and drop files directly into our hard drive. The first thing we'll see when opening our c.img file is this:



This means our hard drive has its space allocated by an OS. We just click on OK and proceed.

Now we just drag and drop our files into the WinImage window. We'll be asked for confirmation:



We just need to agree, and the files will be copied, or, as WinImage puts it, "injected". Errors may occur if the disk image is still being used by PCem or if there is not enough available space in our disk image.

In the case of DOS, we also need to remember that filenames (and folder names) are limited to 8 characters, without spaces or regional signs.

6) Running programs in our machine.

Actually, we still need to perform a few tasks in order to have a fully operating machine, such as installing different drivers (mouse, soundcard, optionally a CD-ROM drive) and running MEMMAKER to optimize our memory.

But the truth is that most programs should be working right away, such as Lotus III, the game we just copied to our hard drive image:



7) Installing drivers and optimizing memory.

If you remember, we chose a Sound Blaster 16 as our music / FX source. We are going to need the following drivers:

Sound Blaster 16 - AWE32 - Basic Disk for Installation DOS & Windows 3.X (Available from Creative Labs website )
Sound Blaster 16 - Advanced Signal Processing Upgrade (CSP.SYS v1.13) (Available from Creative Labs website )

If you're looking for drivers for other obsolete hardware, the VOGONS Vintage Driver Library is a good place to start.

We'll also need a mouse driver. I've found CuteMouse to be a perfect solution for DOS.

The first step is to unzip all drivers and copy them to our harddrive with WinImage . Remember to use DOS-friendly pathnames. In this guide I'll use BASIC and CSP for the SB16 drivers and MOUSE for CuteMouse drivers.

The SB16 drivers are quite user-friendly. We go to each folder, enter INSTALL and follow the onscreen instructions.



Basically, we enter a path and the program will install the necessary files and update our startup files.



But remember to install both SB16 packages, because if we don't we'll get an error message on startup.



After you're done you can delete the BASIC and CSP folders, you won't need them again.

The CuteMouse drivers are a bit trickier. We only need the files inside the BIN folder, which we put in the MOUSE folder, remember?

Now we need to make sure they're loaded every time we start the computer. At the DOS prompt we type the command EDIT AUTOEXEC.BAT.



I've done some cleanup, but essentially this is what you'll see. All you need to do is to add the path to the mouse driver at the very end. So go to the end of the file, add the line C:\MOUSE\CTM-EN.EXE, save the changes and leave.

Another task we should always carry out after installing a new driver is to optimize our memory. In DOS, we do that with the internal program MemMaker. To run it, type MEMMAKER at the DOS prompt.



When prompted, ask for a "Custom setup", answer "yes" to everything and you'll be done in under a minute.

Congratulations! You now have a fully functional DOS environment to run your games!

 

This was a basic example of what you can achieve with PCem, but if you have a very powerful computer you can do much more. Like setting up a Pentium class computer and install Windows 9X on its harddrive. For this, you'll need a Windows 9X CD-ROM (or ISO) and a startup disk, which you can download from here.

PCem can emulate up to Celeron 533 CPUs and 3Dfx / Glide graphics, so the only limit is how powerful your PC is. Here's my Spanish Windows 98SE installation:



And yes, Windows 9X games are perfectly playable, even with 3Dfx effects on.