someone interested in makeing an x86 emulator?

[dr_whooo]

i noticed a post somewhere on this sight about geting a really old game(pc 386 and 486 era) to work on the psp and the reply noted that no x86 emulator was out yet... i was wondering if there was a decent amount of interest to get some one to work on one...

i also found an emulator that was out for pc and had been ported to xbox and i droped them a line on if there was interest and if it was usable (ie premission that kinda thing.. tho not in so many words) this is the web site and they have a good forum and it looks like they got good all around support. http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

so if any one would be willing to push this project im sure there enough x86 era junkies to be interested

[xuphorz]

i noticed a post somewhere on this sight about geting a really old game(pc 386 and 486 era) to work on the psp and the reply noted that no x86 emulator was out yet... i was wondering if there was a decent amount of interest to get some one to work on one...

i also found an emulator that was out for pc and had been ported to xbox and i droped them a line on if there was interest and if it was usable (ie premission that kinda thing.. tho not in so many words) this is the web site and they have a good forum and it looks like they got good all around support. http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/

so if any one would be willing to push this project im sure there enough x86 era junkies to be interested

dosbox isn't very good, the xbox has 733Mhz, but using DosBox, it'l lower itself down to below 50Mhz. or so i've heard

knowing this, i'd hate to think of how much lowerr the clock freq would become of psp

[dr_whooo]

well would it be easy or better to make one from the ground up?

[xuphorz]

well would it be easy or better to make one from the ground up?

no idea. i just help people out on this website, i don't code :(
any coders reading this?

[dr_whooo]

yeah... coders please?

[Cap'n 1time]

holy crap... you just dont request somthing like that... first of x86 is a very complexed thing to emulate (its the freaking base of a PC!) requesting someone to build this from the ground up is like asking someone to climb a ladder to the moon. x86 is deffinatly somthing everyone would like, If anyone is interested they would probably look into the dosbox source. And once again the only reason the xbox dosnt completely handel it is most likely due to lack of interest. As xbox isnt too far from a PC running windows with DirectX 9 It should easily be able to handel dosbox, just as any ~800mhz celeron would.

Dont make stupid request like this.... sheesh.

[dr_whooo]

if you actually read through all the posts you might understand that there is more stuff out there than jsut dosbox.... dosbox is just a stepping stone.. more likly less.. more like a refrence to what might be possible.... and im talking emulator here, not build a pc out of this

all i really want to know is if there is enough interest in it to have some one work on it
i could really care less if it got off the ground. if it did great but if not oh well

[Cap'n 1time]

if you actually read through all the posts you might understand that there is more stuff out there than jsut dosbox.... dosbox is just a stepping stone.. more likly less.. more like a refrence to what might be possible.... and im talking emulator here, not build a pc out of this

all i really want to know is if there is enough interest in it to have some one work on it
i could really care less if it got off the ground. if it did great but if not oh well

i have >900 posts are your telling me to look around? i know what dosbox is, and I know what it means to port and open source program to another bit of software/hardware/both. Years of work has gone into DOSbox and it is quite far along in x86 emulation.

and to this
.... and im talking emulator here, not build a pc out of this .... when you emulate x86 your are emulating the very base of the more modern PC. It is through dosbox and that other x86 emulator (whatever it was called) that windows 98 can be installed on the xbox, and that old msDOS based games can run. Mind you x86 has nothing really to do with microsoft. You know what.. go do some research on it.

My point was that creating an emulator this complexed from the ground up on a bit of hardware that will cease to sale in a few years is not a task anyone wants to take on. From what I understand, even porting any x86 emulator to the dreamcast/ps2/psp is not a task anyone really looks into...

[quzar]

I was the first one that I know of to port an x86 emulator to a non-x86 console. Bhole. It barely plays anything though, for more information look on www.screamcast.net .

The dosbox port to xbox doesn't really mean much because it uses the official xdk and that requires almost nothing to port and is illegal.

Building an x86 emulator from scratch would be easier than making an m68000 emulator, until you get to 486's because they added a lot. I have plans to look into furthering Bhole if at any point the original author gets back into contact with me (for all i know there is a good chance he's dead =\) or if I finally have no other major projects to work on.

[dr_whooo]

the point of this thread was to try to gauge the interest and if there was, see if a team would acctually do teh project. also the dos box emulator is not nessasaraly needed. it was just something used to get interest

[Cap'n 1time]

@quzar It does indeed use the xdk.

[xuphorz]

@anyone who knows
i thought ALL emulators or programs built with SDK were illegal, are they?

[shadowprophet]

But seriously is there anything in the pre pentium age that somone would really care to have emulated ? I mean a dos emu. yeah that sounds snizzle. but if 1timeuser and quzar are right about how complicated this would be, Would it really be worth the trouble to create somthing like that just so we could have a dos foundation? Its interesting.And i do realize the implications of this. But your asking us to stop useing jetpacks and go back to useing wax wings here. I submit that if anything in the pre pentuim age is worth saveing. just port it over. But Its really not worth the trouble I wouldnt think.:eek:

[Cap'n 1time]

@anyone who knows
i thought ALL emulators or programs built with SDK were illegal, are they?

SDK stands for Software Development Kit. XDK refers to the illegal Leaked SDK that comercial xbox developers use. Not all SDK's are illegal.

[djrobx]

DOSBox is a great program. Don't be dissing it just because it doesn't work well on the XBox. :)
But seriously is there anything in the pre pentium age that somone would really care to have emulated ?A LOT of code does not require pentium-specific code, just the basic 32 bit 386-class stuff to be working at a fast enough rate. The technical advances that 486 and Pentium brought like higher clock rates, wider memory bus, onboard cache, integrated FPU, etc aren't necessarily important with regards to emulation. The code is still 386 compatible.

In other words, a good deal of programs would work well on a 386DX+Math Co if it were possible to overclock it to 166mhz. Heck, I bet most programs still have non-FPU compatibility, even though it was unlikely to ever be used.

Of course the practical problem with emulating computers on a PSP is that you don't have a keyboard. Computer games seem to always demand a keyboard somehwere or another ("Enter your initials, save this game as...., press F1 to start..."). DOSBox lets you map buttons to keys, of course.

[quzar]

In an emulated system, you could set the clock rate to whatever you want, so even if it ran better on a p-120, but only required a 386 you could set the clock to 120 and make up for some of the difference.