How hard is it for MS to have a professional 'PCEM' like built in emulator to run 16/32 bit apps?

Copper Contributor

UNLIKE virtualbox/VM workstation PCEM strives for cycle accurate emulation of period bios hardware up to the mid 90s.  Penitum II/Celeron if your host can handle it. 

 

My current host an I7 8th gen that has a clock speed of 2.8GHZ can handle up to Pentium II 200 if it's not a Macromedia/Quicktime game or I have to make another virtual OS at a mid range Socekt 7 Penitum I series.

 

So again I ask why can't Microsoft make a professional job and find a way to make use of multiple CPU's as the new author of PCEM refuses to do so due to the insane amount of work it will take to utilize that aspect so thus PCEM will remain single core only which is a shame.  It really limits it's potential as a 32 bit emulator due to the steep host hardware requirements.

 

Now if only we had a major corporation that had the money and manpower to do something like this built into several layers if necessary.  Geez I wonder who that could be?  

 

 

1 Reply

@Microbroke

Because there is no drive to do so. The only people that really want to run an old OS like this is retro-computing people. There are businesses out there that do run very very old software but they are likely still running on period correct hardware. 

I myself still have a couple of P4's and a 386 and 486 laying around for playing old games and such on. I use PCEM to mess around with things but if I was going to play games I would likely just drag out the old hardware. That is not an option for some people as why the PCEM and X86box projects were created. But for a company like MS there has to be some market drive for such a thing and there just is not.

Also most x86 software can run just fine on windows 10 as it has backward compatibility stuff. Just yesterday I ran Hover off the windows 95 cdrom and it ran just fine in windows 10 64bit.