100% Speed Emulating PentiumM 300MMX & K6-2 300 With Voodoo3 Windows98 SE On PCEm v17 (Ryzen7 5700G)

#PCEm #AMD #Intel #Comparison #Windows98

PCEm development stopped a couple of years ago, it was resurrected as 86Box. What are these? Complete cycle exact PC emulators capable of emulating a humble original IBM-PC to a PentiumII/Pro IBM Compatible machine. Mind you it is NOT virtualization and is a complete software re-implementation of the entire PC with all the gubbins and even the bios.

Sound and visuals are catered for with sound cards and also various graphics cards that are being emulated including 3D hardware accelerators like the Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 cards. Sadly no Nvidia GPUs are emulated. When running Windows 9x games expect DirectX support to be low end as the Voodoo graphics cards are better at their native Glide API.

Why bother with PCEm/86Box? Because it’s like tinkering with the old hardware a little. And it provides an excellent compatibility with MS-DOS, Windows 3.11 and Windows98/95 that is beyond what DOSBox or Bochs can offer.

You see, while modern PCs with Windows 10/11 can be great at running current games but they just aren’t up to running the existing huge backlog of older Windows 9x/DOS games that are out there. In order for you to play these games you either need the old hardware OR some fancy software. Mind you Windows’s backwards compatibility is quite impressive as quite a lot of older titles that are just modern enough do run great.

PCEm compared to 86Box is more stable, and less buggy but as it’s development has stopped and 86Box has 2 years of development under its belt eventually 86Box will end up being the better emulator.

Selecting what hardware to emulate in order for your gaming experience to be great can be a bit of a challenge. For quite some time I believed the Super Socket 7 platform supporting Pentium 300MMX with a Voodoo3 running Windows98SE was the best and fastest solution when using PCEm v17. When by chance I opted to check out AMD K6-2 300 emulation as I actually upgraded to that AMD-chip back in the day, I expected it it be worse than the Pentium 300MMX – but the comparison might not be completely fair as the Intel chip actually is a mobile chip. The FPUs are quite on par, but with a fair few of the tests I did and the games I played I got quite a surprise.

Chapters:
00:00:00 – Introduction (Waffle)
00:06:47 – The Host PC configureation Ryzen7 5700G Windows 11
00:07:03 – Booting the emulated Pentium 300MMX & AMD K6-2 300 side by side
00:07:33 – Running the default 3DMark99 benchmarks side by side
00:13:53 – 3DMark99 Results side by side
00:14:01 – 3DMark99 demo on the winning config
00:18:31 – Running the default 3DMark2000 benchmarks side by side
00:27:24 – 3DMark2000 Results side by side
00:27:30 – Running DOSBENCH side by side
00:34:47 – 3DMark2000 demo on the winning config
00:39:36 – Running various Windows & MS-DOS games on the winning config
01:07:59 – Conclusion statement & lead-out

Thanks for watching – LactobacillusPrime

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