Re: So near but....

Michael K. Johnson (johnsonm@nigel.vnet.net)
Tue, 15 Aug 1995 19:30:49 -0500


Jeff Noxon writes:
>> Does a 386 need to be emulated, or will an 8088 suffice? Not that I can
>> produce either, but I am interested in the size of the task.
>
>I think I read somewhere that it emulates a 286. That aside, does anyone
>know of a free x86 simulator that could be adapted for this purpose? I think
>it would be a huge pain to try to support more than a few video adapters and
>chipsets directly.

Some time ago I used PCM, but I don't know where to find it now,
and I don't remember the copyright conditions. It's CPU emulation
is pretty good, as I recall, but I don't know where to find it.
I checked my backups of the account where I used to have it, and
I apparantly removed it before making the backups... It's possible
it's in one of my piles of floppies, but I don't know. Feel free
to try an archie search for it...

PCEMU can be found at ftp.cs.bris.ac.uk in /users/hedley/ as
pcemu1.01alpha.tar.gz. It specifies "non-commercial use"
only. I'd suggest taking a look at it and talking to the
author to see if he's interested in relaxing his conditions
so that the cpu emulator could be used and modified to fit.

Adding support for 32-bit registers and other facilities of
the 386 that are available in real mode shouldn't be too
hard. And presumably it would be possible to find out by
trial and error what 386 pieces would really need to be
supported.

bochs is out of the question since it is shareware.

michaelkjohnson