PCem is an impressively versatile emulator, capable of emulating a wide range of IBM compatible PCs. From XT 8088 based machines up to Late Pentium I MMX era machines, making it a viable alternative to DOSbox and virtualization.
The latest version at the time of writing is PCem V12. Heading up the list of improvements are speed optimizations and Vodoo 2 support.
Games from the late 90s era of Windows computing are notoriously difficult to get working on a modern install of Windows. These latest improvements make PCem an attractive option to play around with.
This tutorial will focus on setting up PCem to run Windows games from this era. You should also be able to run older Windows software and even many DOS games well as a bonus. If you need to see any of the images in more detail, right click on them and click view image. The files needed should be easily searchable by the names I give.
Things you will need:
- A fast CPU. At least if you want to run the more demanding 3DFX titles. Something around the 4Ghz mark. Emulation of a single thread CPU is impossible to run on multiple threads. As a result, a slower clocked octo core CPU will be no help to you here. I’m using an i7 3820 running at 4.2Ghz and I’m able to get performance similar to a Pentium 1 200Mhz. This gets me a good frame rate in games like Quake 2, Need for Speed III and even pretty playable frame rates in Quake 3. A host CPU of around half the speed will likely be able to keep up with games made for a Pentium 1 90Mhz.
- PCem. Get it here:
http://pcem-emulator.co.uk/downloads.html - Compatible BIOS files:
https://mega.nz/#!p99klbTb!A5-E97bh290pALB7vayX7t8ibVLgWKfmFf2GoU8oj04 - Windows 95 OSR2.5 CD image:
You can use an actual CD or a .iso disc image.
https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-95/osr-3
From what I understand this version of Win 95 is the one to get. Better compatibility with things apparently. It does cause a slight complication during the setup but it’s not a big deal. - Windows 95 boot floppy disk image:
You’ll need floppy disk image windows95b.img or this boot.img here:
https://mega.nz/#!888XlQ4A!pRdORIFx3W4zw8KAemkOUZVTm3Gu4X0gPzgzn-1mLDY
We’ll need this to setup our virtual hard drive. Make sure it’s a .img file. - Win9x Voodoo 2 drivers:
http://www.falconfly.de/voodoo2.htm
Get the latest reference driver from 2000. Just note that you will need to install DirectX 7 for many games to work properly, even if the games themselves don’t require Dx7.
You’re also going to need to install some additional software:
- A tool to extract compressed archives. I recommend 7zip:
http://www.7-zip.org/download.html - Daemon Tools lite or similar CD image mounting software:
https://www.daemon-tools.cc/products/dtlite
Windows comes built in with it’s own image mounting software but it’s limited in compatibility. - ImgBurn:
http://www.imgburn.com/index.php?act=download
Once you’ve got all that you should have a collection of files that looks something like this:
Initial Emulator Setup
To get things started we’ll need to extract the PCem archive. Plonk it where ever is convenient to you. I’m going to keep everything in the one folder.
Extract the pcem_v11_roms.7z archive somewhere else convenient too.
Open up your PCem folder and in a new window, open up the folder you extracted the pcem_v11_roms archive to.
In the PCem folder there is a folder called roms. We’ll need to copy the contents of the pcem_v11_roms folder into this folder.
Select all files inside pcem_v11_roms and drag them into your PCem\Roms folder. Overwrite files if it asks.
Now all those funny named folders have ROMs inside them. Most importantly you should have a file named 55xwuq0e.bin contained within the 430vx folder. This is the mother board BIOS ROM that we will be using.
Back out to the root of your PCem folder. Fire up PCem.exe
It might start up as some sort of Sinclair computer. Just ignore that. If your mouse cursor has become trapped within the emulator press Ctrl + End to get it back. Open up the settings menu and click configure. Change the options in the window that pops up to look like this:
Don’t be concerned about the CPU speed too much, we can bump that up at any time and using a slower Pentium runs better during the initial setup of Windows.
Click the configure button next to Voodoo Graphics and change the settings to these:
It will complain about having to reset, just hit okay in both instances. The emulator will restart and you should be presented with a nostalgic POST screen – at least to some of you:
Setting Up the Virtual Hard Drive
Open up the Disc menu and find Configure hard disks…
Make sure under C: that Hard drive is selected and then click the New button.
In the window that pops up, click the unhelpfully labelled “…” button.
This will let you select a location for your virtual hard drive. The file is going to take up roughly 8GB of disk space. I recommend making a folder labelled “hdd” in your PCem folder and placing it in there. It will ask you to choose a name. Call it something like “Win95”
Next you’re going to want to change the value in the Cylinders field. The maximum is 16383 so lets go with that. Leave Sectors and Heads at their default values of 63 and 16 respectively.
Once you hit OK, PCem is going to lock up. Don’t panic, it’s creating the virtual hard drive file. It’ll take a minute or two before popping up a window reminding you to partition and format your drive. We will get to that soon. Hit OK and PCem will complain about needing to reset again. Hit OK.
You should now be back at the POST display we saw earlier. Click on the display and hit the DEL key to enter the BIOS setup screen. Select STANDARD CMOS SETUP.
Use the down arrow key on your keyboard and select Primary Slave. Primary Master should be set to Auto. To speed up boot times a little we can set the three other drives to None. Press PgDn twice to change this and repeat for Secondary Master and Secondary Slave.
Hit ESC to back out to the main menu and then press F10 then Y and then Enter on your keyboard to save the settings. The emulated system will now reboot, go through the POST screen again and then complain about NOT HAVING ANY BOOT DISK. Time to fix that I suppose.
Press Ctrl + End to release your mouse from the emulator and open up the Disc drop down menu. Select “Change Drive A:” Navigate to the boot.img I had you download, select it and press open.
Now open up the File drop down menu and select Hard Reset.
The emulator will now restart and boot from the floppy disk image we just virtually inserted into it’s virtual floppy disk drive virtually.
You’ll be presented with this screen:
Hit 1 and enter to continue with CD-ROM support. Give it a few moments and you should have something like this on your screen:
Type in “fdisk” at the prompt and press Y to say yes to large disk support.
Now press 1 and enter to Create DOS partition or Logical DOS drive. Then 1 again at the next screen to Create Primary DOS Partition
After a brief moment it will ask you if you want to make the maximum space available plus make the partition the active partition. Press Y for yes and then enter.
Fdisk will then inform us that we MUST restart the system. Let’s not upset it. Press Ctrl + End and select the File menu and Hard Reset once again. Say yes to CD-ROM support once again when you’re asked.
Once the system is back to the A:\> prompt type in “format c:” and press enter. It will warn you about erasing all data on c: but since we haven’t put anything on there yet I don’t think we need to worry about that. Press y and then enter.
Formatting will take a few minutes. Once it’s finished it will ask you to give it a label. You can hit Enter for no label or call it whatever you like.
That’s the Virtual Hard drive setup and ready to have Windows installed on it.
Installing Windows
First we are going to need to mount the disc image of the Windows 95 installation CD. There are a couple of ways to go about this.
You can either use Daemon Tools to mount the image, once mounted in Daemon Tools you can then open the settings menu in PCem, navigate to CD-ROM and then select the virtual drive you have the Windows CD mounted to. You may need to close and re-open PCem in order for it to see the newly mounted image.
If you don’t want to use Daemon tools, you can mount it directly within PCem by going to Settings–>CD-ROM–>ISO… Navigate to the Windows 95 OSR 2.5 I had you download at the beginning, select it and click Open.
Whichever method you decide to use you will need to restart PCem. It will again boot from our boot disk floopy image. Again select CD-ROM support.
Once you’re at the A:\> prompt, check that the CD is mounted correctly by typing e: and press Enter. You should now be at an E:\> prompt. Type dir and hit enter. You should see these files and folders listed:
There is a bug with the version of Windows that we are installing that won’t let it read from the WIN95 folder on the CD during the install, so we’ll need to copy it over onto the c:\ drive manually.
First let’s make a directory on the c: drive to copy the folder into.
Type c: and press Enter.
Type md WIN95 and press Enter. (md is the make directory command. you can check that it’s made the folder by typing dir and pressing Enter. It should look like this:
Now we can copy the files from the CD onto c:\ . Type:
copy e:\WIN95 c:\WIN95
Press enter and you should see it copying the files. You can navigate into the folder and check that all the files are there by typing:
cd win95
Then:
dir/p
Once you hit enter it will display the list of files contained in the directory. Keep pressing any key until you are returned to the prompt. Once you’ve confirmed the WIN95 folder from the CD is on your c: drive we can go back to the e: and start the Windows setup. Type e: and press Enter.
At the E:\> prompt type setup and press enter. Press enter again and the installer will run through it’s checks to make sure everything is ready to go. Once it’s done, press x on your keyboard to Exit and jump into the Windows setup proper.
Windows Setup GUI
Alright, you can start using your mouse again. Press Continue to get things started. Press Yes to accept the license agreement and Next two times to get to the type of install you want. Select Typical and hit next. (You can select custom and choose to install additional components like games and mouse pointers but these can also be installed later once Windows setup has completed.)
Once you hit next it will ask you for a COA key. You can search around for one or search around for one.
At the next screen, enter your name and make up a dumb company name if you want and hit next.
It will then ask what type of devices it searches for just check both boxes and hit next.
I forgot to take pictures during this part so here’s a screenshot of a progress bar:
This will take a minute or so. Once that’s done if you selected typical install it will ask you if you want to install the most common components or if you want to choose. Just select common and move on. You’ll then be asked if you want to make a start up disk. Say no and click next and then next again to start it copying files.
It will take a few more minutes to do it’s thing. Once that’s done it will ask you to restart the system. Before doing that make sure to eject the floppy disk image by pressing Ctrl + End and then going to the Disc menu and selecting Eject drive A:
Hit finish and the system will reboot and continue into Windows.
Here’s why we had to faff about, moving files in DOS:
Hit OK. In the next window that pops up click on Browse…
The Win95 folder on c: we created should be right there.
Double click on it.
Windows should see the .cab file it’s looking for and display it in the left panel there. Click OK, then OK again.
Windows will now go through it’s unpacking process. Tell it what time zone you are in when it asks. If it asks you to setup a printer or something else you don’t care about just click on cancel. Once all that is done Windows will reboot again.
The emulator should now boot into the default Windows 95 256 colour desktop, in all it’s turquoise glory. You should find that the base graphics card has installed itself so feel free to up the resolution and colour depth in screen properties. You should have also noticed a startup sound indicating sound drivers are also installed.
If for some reason you don’t get any sound, you can try running the add new hardware wizard in the control panel. If it asks for your Windows 95 CD just point it to the WIN95 folder on the c: drive that we created.
Grab this Soundblaster software suite CD image if you want more advanced features and other related stuff:
http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=13
Okay, moving on. Head on over to the device manager, you will find PCI multimedia Video Device without drivers. That’s our emulated Voodoo 2. To install it we’re going to need a way to get files from the host system into the emulator. This is where Imgburn comes in.
Importing Files Into PCem and Installing 3DFX Drivers
Extract the Voodoo 2 drivers you downloaded and open up imgburn.
Select Create Image File from Files/Folders.
Hit the Show Disc Layout Editor, find your voodoo 2 driver folder and drag it into the lower panel.
Close that window. And find the sneaky little toggle button I’ve highlighted below that tells Imgburn to write the image to a disc image and not your optical disc drive (if you have one).
Click the little folder to tell Imgburn where to save the image we’re creating to. Then click the big button in the bottom left to create the image. Hit Yes to select the default image name and we’re done with Imgburn.
Mount the image you just created with Daemon tools or with PCem as described earlier and a CD containing our files will appear within Windows 95.
Run the Voodoo 2 executable and extract the driver files somewhere handy. c:\voodoo2 is good.
Open up the control panel, navigate to System, open up the device manager tab and find PCI Multimedia Video Device. Double click on it, click on the driver tab and click on Update Driver…
Choose Yes to search for the driver and click next. Give it a moment and it will say it was unable to locate a driver but there will now be a button labelled Other Locations that you can click on. Click Browse, find your voodoo2 folder on c: and click OK and then OK again.
Click Finish and Windows will throw up an error message telling you to insert the disk labelled Voodoo 2.
Windows 95! \o/
Hit OK. Again, click browse on the window that pops up and yet again navigate to your voodoo 2 folder on c:\ until a .dll file appears in the left panel.
Click OK. Then OK once again. This bullshit is fairly standard procedure when installing drivers in Win9x. Their are many things I remember fondly about Windows 95 but installing new hardware is not one of them.
It will install the driver, prompt you to restart the system. Once rebooted, you should now have the Voodoo 2 drivers installed.
And that’s pretty much it. You’re ready to install some games.
If you think I’ve said something dumb and need to correct something, be sure to let me know in the comments. Please let me know if any of the links are dead too. I hope you have a good time using PCem and that this has been of some use.
Things to Note
A quirk of PCem to be aware of is that if a program isn’t using much CPU the emulator can slow right down. Sim City 2000 for example will run very slowly when you aren’t moving around the map and in game menus, you might notice sound stuttering. The best fix for this is to lower the CPU down to a slower chip. Like a Pentium 90Mhz. The general rule of thumb is to use the lowest speed CPU that will allow you to run the game smoothly. For 2d games use something like a Pentium 90 and for 3d use a Pentium 200Mhz MMX. You will probably need to experiment with it a bit. You can change the CPU while the emulator is running. It’s best to do it while on the Windows desktop because some games can freeze up if you swap around CPUs while they are running.
Full screen can be found in the settings menu under video. Direct 3d tends to look best and be sure to set Full screen stretch mode to 4:3 if you don’t want it to look ugly and stretched. Press Alt + Ctrl + PgDn to exit full screen.
Testing Out Some Games
I’ll throw up a few screenshots of games here and describe the sort of performance I get with each.
The Need for Speed: Special Edition
With the CPU set to 166Mhz audio is quite choppy in the game menus. In game it runs perfectly with high settings and no audio issues.
Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit
You may need to install the DirectX 5 redistributable that comes on the game’s CD before this game will work properly. Be sure to set the video device to Voodoo 2 using the games video setup program. Running with a 200Mhz CPU the game runs smoothly. The menus are a little bit choppy but in game performance is good with all the graphical bells and whistles turned up.
Quake II
I was running this from a physical CD and was experiencing poor performance and choppy sound. Ripping the disc with ImgBurn to my hard drive and mounting the image solved it. I believe this was due to CD audio played during the game. The game runs great in Glide mode. Very smooth.
Interstate 76
Here we have -at least for me- the best reason to setup PCem. Interstate 76 will not run correctly on a modern computer. Today’s CPUs completely break the physics and AI rendering the game unplayable. Even the gog.com version suffers from this problem. A shame as you aren’t going to find a better game in the car combat sub-genre. I love this game.
At first performance in PCem was disappointing. Running the game at anything higher than 320×240 resolution resulted in a very choppy frame rate. However installing the official “gold patch” allows the game to run in Direct3d or Glide mode instead of the original release’s software renderer. Running in either of these new modes results in a very smooth frame rate and the game becomes perfectly playable. The 3dFX glide mode looks the best. Great stuff.
If you start seeing texture corruption, quickly hit escape to enter the menu and then jump back in and you should be good for the rest of the mission. I’m not sure if this is caused by the emulator, the game or using the Voodoo 2. As a result of cobbling together a vehicle combat game using the Mech Warrior 2 engine, I76 was never a particularly bug free game anyway.
i76 gold patch download:
https://mega.nz/#!BwsXxKZb!ySGRNZnCR8AcIkhMO0iaH8tFIilsb2loWgdDrEXxpOc
Sub Culture
With the CPU set to a Pentium 166Mhz and running the 3DFX version, in game frame rates are 30+. Runs great, very playable. FMVs play perfectly. Menus have choppy music. Running a slower clocked Pentium fixes this but will result in poorer frame rates in game. The Direct3D version of the game seems to run pretty much the same.
I haven’t played much of this game but it seems to have a bit of a cult following. It’s like Elite but miniature and in the ocean. There isn’t much support for this game and as it uses a 16-bit installer program, installing it on a 64-bit install of Windows isn’t much of an option. Another good use for PCem.
