DOSbox and Pentium 4 machines?

[pgru2]

Hi and thank You for answering in advance
Just curious is modern DOSBox(or similar) capable of emulating Pentium 4 machines like that with P4XFCU board, Radeon 9200 / Nvidia 6600 and using Win98SE? With exact/similar speed of real machine on quite modern like Asus ROG with Core i7 7th Gen?

As I remember the problem with VirtualBox was mainly with drivers for graphics card, it was hard to find something well working with Win 9x?

 

[Timo W.]

Simple answer: no. That's also not the purpose of DOSBox.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Neither DosBox or Virtualbox are magic applications where you can select whatever hardware you want to emulate. DosBox only emulates a very narrow window of x86 hardware from the 808x - 386 Era.

Virtualbox doesn't do that at all. While it does have options to have a DOS or Windows 9x guest, there are no properly hardware accelerated guest drivers, forcing you to use very slow emulated VESA modes.

If you want a Pentium 4 machine, you're going to have to buy one.

 

[pgru2]

I don't known if this may be connected with DOSBox or VirtualBox but some time ago I used some dll's or something similar on Win10 that tried to emulate older DirectX(to try running older Win games), and there was an option(?) to chose video graphics card. There was some similar Radeon, and S3 trio as I remember.

I don't exactly understand how it worked but probably it translated DirectX 7 or 9 to virtual emulated card. The card was emulated on more modern OpenGL or DirectX. So just guessing if somebody known how card work, and if there is a code on a web(maybe it also need a good license), maybe it is not hard to include this in programs like VirtualBox or DOSBox?

 

[Chuck(G)]

Dunno about DOSBox, but how far will QEMU get you?

 

[evildragon]

PCem to an extent can let you select some models and stuff, but you need to provide the BIOS image for it.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

I don't known if this may be connected with DOSBox or VirtualBox but some time ago I used some dll's or something similar on Win10 that tried to emulate older DirectX(to try running older Win games), and there was an option(?) to chose video graphics card. There was some similar Radeon, and S3 trio as I remember.

There's no reason to emulate older DX versions because Microsoft designed DX to be almost completely backwards compatible with older versions. The only thing you need to do in later versions of Windows is install the DX runtimes, which copies all of the older DX DLLs to where they need to go in the Windows directory.

You'll run into dependency issues or game code issues long before you'll run into DX issues.

I don't exactly understand how it worked but probably it translated DirectX 7 or 9 to virtual emulated card. The card was emulated on more modern OpenGL or DirectX. So just guessing if somebody known how card work, and if there is a code on a web(maybe it also need a good license), maybe it is not hard to include this in programs like VirtualBox or DOSBox?

It's very rare that an entire video card architecture is emulated, the only case where it is done is if it's a very old standard like CGA/EGA/MDA or if it's something that hasn't been made in 20 years like 3dfx cards, where the Glide API is emulated.