Fake86 added.

[Azul Fria]

Forum member Mike Chambers has informed us an emulator he has recently re-worked on and completed in C when it was originally worked on in Basic and abandoned.

It's open-source, supports all 8086 and 80186 instrutions, emulates most of the standard PC hardware, uses image files for floppy/hard drive (like QEMU), runs on windows/linux (and OS X with a little tweaking of the source)..

It runs every version of DOS.

feature overview:
-complete 8086/80186 CPU emulation
-intel 8259 interrupt controler emulation
-hercules/CGA/MCGA/VGA emulation (lacks EGA and 640x480 4-bit VGA currently)
-adlib emulation
-disney sound source emulation
-in windows, it can use winpcap to emulate a network card... theres a special DOS packet driver designed for it that is on the fd-fake86.ima floppy image that comes with the windows download (PD.COM)

(no DMA controller or sound blaster emulation yet, but eventually...)

more info, downloads, screenshots, etc:
http://fake86.rubbermallet.org

video of it playing Wolfenstein 3D:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIgcIgz-EQ4

^youtube's encoding messed up the audio pretty nicely for some reason. it sounds better than this. the video there sounds like its underwater or something.

it's also very fast, it rivals DOSBox for speed. depending on what's being emulated, it'll emulate between 25 million and 70 million instructions/sec on my 3.2 GHz AMD Phenom II X4 955.

Download the emulator on Zophar's Domain here.

[Mike Chambers]

something i should have mentioned is that the regular wolfenstein 3d exe won't run as it requires a 286, but a few years ago i had modded the source of it to work on an 8086/8088. it was to try it on a real 8088. it was.... incredibly slow! go figure. but, that exe works great in fake86.

i also integrated a cheat menu you can get to right from the main menu.

http://rubbermallet.org/wolf8086.exe

[ecoimpjaabjaag]

I get about 18MIPS (I'm assuming that's what the avg speed is) on a Core i5-430M, Wolf3d and Ultima run at normal speed so that's good news
What kind of optimizations are you doing, if any, or are you going for a more pure (accurate) emulation like bsnes?
Anyway, good job and interesting...

[Mike Chambers]

Originally Posted by ecoimpjaabjaag

I get about 18MIPS (I'm assuming that's what the avg speed is) on a Core i5-430M, Wolf3d and Ultima run at normal speed so that's good news
What kind of optimizations are you doing, if any, or are you going for a more pure (accurate) emulation like bsnes?
Anyway, good job and interesting...

thanks.

i'm not doing any especially major optimizations, it's just a pure interpreter CPU emulator. no kind of dynamic recompilation or anything. because of this, other emulators like DOSBox are faster.

i'm not aiming for perfect hardware accuracy either, i'm trying to make sure the actual CPU code is bug-free but the rest of the hardware emulation i'm just aiming for "good enough" to run 99% of DOS apps. it's not quite there yet.

i've been writing the whole thing from the ground up over the last couple weeks, and the new release (whenever its done, might be a couple months) will support at least 386 emulation with protected mode.