86Box: Why Not Pentium III?

Post by anthk » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 3:21 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #52

zozbot234 wrote: post #10

Arguably, cycle-accurate emulation should be done with FPGA support anyway. The Pentium III is old enough that there should be no legal obstacle to implementing new compatible hardware.

The problem won't be legal, but scale: the Pentium 3 has ~9.5M transistors [1] - and the world's largest FPGA, at a staggering price point of 55.000 dollars, has only 9M logic gates [2]. Probably you could use an FPGA a bit smaller if you use FPGA-native memory for L1-L3 instead of transistors, but you'll nevertheless need an FPGA that is many orders of magnitude too expensive for a hobbyist niche project. Also, you…

Post by drewzero1 » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 3:23 PM UTC

leeter wrote: post #31

spijdar wrote: post #5

Something alluded to, but not really elaborated on, is what the motivation is for emulating progressively newer CPUs, versus virtualizing them. With old hardware, the sort I imagine 86Box is mainly used to emulate (it's how I use it, anyway), old OSes rely on specific behavior of old systems and peripherals that can't be easily virtualized through KVM + QEMU or the like. A mixture of processors being too fast and beh…

I recall awhile back Linus Tech Tips pointed out that the primary failure point for old machines wasn't the CPUs which tend to be piling up cheaply (I can't say how true this is for pre PIII parts) but instead the motherboards. I wonder if in some sense there isn't a market for someone to just make new motherboards instead for this stuff using modern parts. I realize there are some licensing issues after a certain po…

Post by Zardoz84 » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 3:24 PM UTC

sidewndr46 wrote: post #45

leeter wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall awhile back Linus Tech Tips pointed out that the primary failure point for old machines wasn't the CPUs which tend to be piling up cheaply (I can't say how true this is for pre PIII parts) but instead the motherboards. I wonder if in some sense there isn't a market for someone to just make new motherboards instead for this stuff using modern parts. I realize there are some licensing issues after a certain po…

For the Intel chips up to and including the Pentium 4 licensing a chipset would not be an issue. VIA made chipsets back when those products were new. I think there was a lawsuit about it, but VIA prevailed. You could license the chipset from them, then use it with an authentic Intel CPU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_VIA_chipsets#:~:text=V... . But to your original point: CPUs don't really fail unless abused…

Post by rnd0 » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 3:27 PM UTC

jordemort wrote: post #30

Why do people who write emulators all seem to dislike each other?

Post by maccard » Fri, Apr 08, 2022, 3:30 PM UTC

drewzero1 wrote: post #63

leeter wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall awhile back Linus Tech Tips pointed out that the primary failure point for old machines wasn't the CPUs which tend to be piling up cheaply (I can't say how true this is for pre PIII parts) but instead the motherboards. I wonder if in some sense there isn't a market for someone to just make new motherboards instead for this stuff using modern parts. I realize there are some licensing issues after a certain po…

I kind of miss add-in processor cards to allow a computer to run software from another architecture. Those devices were basically a whole computer on a card or add-on that would use the host computer for I/O with some level of integration. Stuff like the Apple IIe card for the Macintosh LC, or the MacCharlie sidecar for the original Macintosh that allowed it to run PC programs. I bet there are modern PCI cards out th…