x86 Emulation makes it to the H/PC - BOCHS 2.1.1

We managed to peek user interest recently by posting a screenshot which has captivated some of you, of a Jornada 720 booting Windows 98.

We have have been receiving a steady stream of requests for more information on how we managed that, and so we're delighted to give you a run down on the background technology involved, and an overview of the procedure itself.
HPC:Factor Editor Chris Tilley battles against the odds to bring the PC to the H/PC.

Have your say here on the forum.

Editorial: x86 Emulation makes it to the H/PC - BOCHS 2.1.1

For anyone who wants to try this for themselves, I have put together a little pack of useful 'bits'.

bochs-hpc-j720.zip

In here I have placed

• A config file


• The System BIOS Image


• The Video BIOS Image


• Utility to write floppy disk images


• Utility to write the Binary file hard disk image

You just need to Comment the config file in/out as applicable and add paths (I've commented it up with instructions - WATCH out for the Hard Drive Cylinders etc)

With it you should get up and running an awful lot faster than I did.

Err, excuse me for my total lack of care about this one....

\cynic mode
Some enterprising gearhead could do the same emulation for a Commodore 64 if they *wanted* to. But what *good* would it be to the mob?

Oh, I suppose in a few years with tweaks and tuning and a 2ghz PPC it will install in only 5 hours then boot and load in only 10 minutes. Great, then you can use 10 year old software on your 7 year old hpc device.

I installed 95 ONCE on a 386sx 16mhz with 4mb ram. That was more painful than I care to repeat.

Wake me when BOSCHS boots XP in 10 seconds and runs most everything available.
\cynic mode off

Edited by wallythacker 2005-07-02 6:11 PM

hahaha,

Well quite, with some improvments the software concept is a proven one. The hardware is catching up. The consumer will see a lot of virtualisation in the future, with it implimented into Longhorn supposedly in some areas.

I chose Windows 95 to demnstrate this as it has the lowest footprint and wouldn't knacker my CF card when I was testing on it. It is probably that NT4 will load on it successfully, it'll run on 8, and run SP6a on 12. That makes it more relevant to the Win32 model. XP currently doesn't run on the CE port, 2000 certainly does on the PC version, so XP probalby will too.

The latest desktop release (remember this is built on the older 2.11 release of the day) emulates x86-64 too.
So from that perspective, it being strictly limited to running ancient applications is moot. I could have installed firefox on the demonstration, but with no lan access currently it wouldn't have had anything to show off.

As to people finding it useful, there clearly are people that want emulation whether that be in games or in legacy dos applications - if it weren't true I wouldn't have gameboy roms on my H/PC, and PocketDOS wouldn't make a turnover.

All it lacks is RAM write to disk. If you coudl do that, you could get back up and running in the time it took to swap the ram image back into system memory - just as with Virtual PC 2004.

wow hehehe

i'm not sure i'll take the trouble though.. hmmmm let's see..

Now if we can get an emulator to run as a dynamic thin service with codeset switching, we can run any app regardless if it was compiled for SH3/4, MIPS, ARM.. And do it transparently (if a tad slower on the emulation-wrapped apps).

Hey does the emulator do serial port?
mouse
modem
ActiveSync...

In any case, thx Chris for taking the time to do this. Next time if someone asks this question, we know where to point

I went through mouse in the editorial, there is serial support, but I didn't try it to see if it was implimented; Windows did install serial ports.

Nice job Chris!

This kinda reminds me of another thread in another forum where I asked about a PC emu amidst Apple/GameBoy/Atari emu fan-boys! Their reaction: "Why would anyone want that??" ...

It really all depends on what you need to do. Like what Chris and others said, some may just need to run *THAT* old 95app on the run and if the progress on this thingie improves enough to give it near-instant-on access time (or isn't it already?), then it might just be what some of us need.

Talking about that, since the emu is another app, when you suspend the HPC, it should also stay put right? So when you turn on the HPC, it should be right where it was. In that sense, someone could very well use his HPC purely in emu mode and have a miniPC running win95.

Now to get the network stack running ...

Yes it is a blessing in so far as a suspend operation means you get to resume from where you left off.

The problem is that you have to use nyditot, and in order to use the day-to-day hpc apps on a HVGA screen, means a lot of frustrating scrolling.
All I ask for is scroll bars

Don't forget you can run newer x86 OS's than 95, including linux. I was going to go for 98, but because I was running my testing on the CF card I was worried that the extra write overhead for 98 would wreck it.. and HAL enumeration took too long.
I later moved to network booting it.

I don wonder what it is like on XScale. Could be worth a look for a MP900 user

hm, ok, maybe i'll try it on the 900.. i just don't have win95 CD or whatever to install.. but if you help with that, i'm willing to test

I am impressed

Cool. I did notice the mouse in the editorial, but I thought you meant using the touch screen (too good to be true?). If you could use a serial mouse it'd kinda help for certain access.

Another thing is modem. If I understand it correctly, you mean the emulator can't emulate a LAN with the real LAN under CE, so you can't access the internet. But if it supports the serial port, you can easily hook up an old 56k modem and dial it up. Or simpler yet, set up a null modem with a PC.

You can also connect thru serial cable with cell phones. There's even a serial bluetooth adapter.

And finally, if you can install ActiveSync on it, you can sync it with another CE device thru the serial port.

OK now where's my aspirin

Yea, I followed you. The answer to all the points is that I didn't test the Serial. If it works you can hardware it to death, mouse, modem, cell phone included.

If it could pass through to a Socket Serial card, you literally could

Serial card - what do you mean? Most HPCs (and PPCs) already have serial port, such as Jornada; all you need is a cable with the correct gender, right? And that's what I hope the emulator can access.