MS-DOS on a PiStorm Amiga 500 running Emu68
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 25 ส.ค. 2024
- Christmas might be over for another year but its still DOScember and no better way to round off this years videos than take another look at MS-DOS running on an Amiga using PC-TASK.
Last year we looked at version 3.1 of this software running on my 40MHz A1200 but this year and now that I have a PiStorm in my A500 running Emu68 and pumping out 833MIPS, well, I thought we'd see just how well PC-Task 4.4 runs, and of course we have to run a quick AmiQuake benchmark.
Not just as fast as I had initially hoped, but we do get it running, EVENTUALLY!
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Couple of things not covered in the video:
1. The corruption seen in autoexec.bat has reappeared but is also within config.sys. I’m not 100% sure why this is happening, it certainly never happened on the 1200 but if I had to guess I think it’s a conflict with the PFS3 file system I’m using on the 500. While the corruption persists it never seems to effect the emulation.
2. Running within WinUAE I can easily launch windows in normal or enhanced mode. Again I’m not 100% sure why this doesn’t work on the 500, at a guess it might be something to do with WinUAE emulating a 68030 whereas the PiStorm emu68 is emulating a 68040. I suppose it could also be linked to the corruption.
3. Another potential issue with this later version of PC Task is that the files available on Aminet are not the original disks (as they are for PC-Task 3.1). Rather it’s an LHA file of someone’s installation (less the hardfile). It should be possible to mount the hardfile within AmigaOS as an accessible drive but to do so you need a hardfile.device and this is missing. I have found a copy of it on an EAB thread but when I try to mount the hardfile it doesn’t work. If anyone has this file or knows how to get this working it please let me know as it would make copying files over a lot easier.
My advice for the corruption is never to try exotic file systems if you want to made a PCTask partition. Only the original FFS international made it the best choice. And of course if you want to make a hardfilesystem inside Pfs or Sfs or any other exxept FFS maybe in some way you will get a mess !!! So try to change the filesystem you want to make a hardfile partition or make an other only with the FFS for this reason. 👍🥳
Hello! Is it reasonable to use PFS or is it more of an experiment? Because I remember PFS as being a very interesting innovation in the 90s, but also losing a lot of data because of it.. must have been PFS1. Is it supposedly stable now?
@@elmariachi5133 yes it is reasonable. But if you mess with PcTask and like that who have been made in mind for the FFS it is better to use FFS for this kind of software .
@@johnnydreamwarior Thanks
@@elmariachi5133 you welcome!!!! For the info , the latest PFS3aio is the best pfs and with better solution to the most problems from the past. See on Aminet the difference from older pfs. But again to the point the best try for the pctask.emulation is the FFS filesystem.
Would love to see a emu68 setup video including flashing the pistorm etc.
Amiga and MS-DOS... it feels so wrong, yet so exciting!
That's what makes it fun 😉
the amiga was never blessed the latest or the best versions CPU, except, with a the new where crazily expensive and on cards, if you compare PC of the same vintage, date, DOS prompt was still common (MS Windows was just a fancy toy, back then) in the average configuration, of the time the AMIGA could easily keep up, and even go faster in some tasks, heck it could even do a resemble job of emulating (or simulating an APPLE-MAC) the problem was the AMIGA never kept up in the hardware war with, mainly because it didn't need that must to work as an a Amiga, it worked well enough, the amiga would hit a wall, you could not do much, with PC or a Mac with less than 7MB memory, yet the AMIGA, was blessed with 2 or 4MB of memory ,and a hard disk was just a dream, tray run a graphic program on a PC with out a graphic card, if, it would run at all, you could watch draw each pixel on the screen, and the lower priced mac's only have black/white screen, not much good colour word, so the AMIGA out of the box was lacking, and yet it could still keep up, it was only beaten, time PC/MAC got faster/ better / and disk storage, if you compere the big box Amiga's the cracks with PC's and Mac of that time really show up, 🙂
Nice experiment =D Was fun to see you test all that stuff out! Hope you had a good Christmas!
It was fun to play with if not a bit frustrating at times.
Had a great Christmas, thanks for asking. I hope all is well with you.
Boy they really updated the Emu68 core to ludicrous speed! Nice!
Just remember to buckle up 🤣
Nice way to squeeze a bit of Amiga into doscember.
I haven't touched my PiStorm since building and initial setup back in July. I was waiting for the software side to develop a bit more, looks like that's happening. :)
A rough-guide/ refresher would be great.
Emu68 for want of a better term is essentially a different firmware for the PiStorm. It's a bare metal emulator so isn't running Linux underneath. It's really easy to setup though so, I'll see about pulling together a quick video.
@@CRG Please do, I've had no problems with musashi but emu68 is making me tear my hair out.
@@Retro_Sorcerer the hardest thing is setting up the partition for the amiga drive but even that's no biggie, it's just knowing what the exact partition type it has to be. A guide would definitely be good though 👍
Great video, I really want to see you go full circle and emulate an amiga in Win 😀
Hi
I commented on one of your earlier PC Task videos that back in the day I played around with pc task on my 1200 with a 25mhz GVP 030 accelerator.
I remember ending up with MS Dos and Windows 3.1. It installed cleanly but ran terribly.
The pistorm obviously providing the muscle.
Great videos. Keep them up.
Awesome work. That was amazing!
Thank for saying so.
I really need to find an old school pc like this to mess around with. Someone recently gave me an original G4 Mac that I've been messing with, the first mac I've ever really used. Has been neat to mess around with. Keep up the good work, Happy new year.
I've a few Mac's here myself but never really got into them. Amigas are getting harder to come by but they are out there. Old PCs are plentiful, just be careful you don't end up with about 40 systems and nowhere to put them 😉
I've seen another video on the PiStorm (can't remember which though). In there it was suggested that the CPU be limited to a 68020 in an A500. The more advanced instructions of the 030/040 might require signals from the CPU socket that simply aren't available in the A500.
Not heard that one before, on my pistorm build I'm running the 030 emulation and it's fine. Thinking about it I should maybe have tried PC-TASK on that as well, might have been more compatible.
CRG, I would also love to see an Emu68 setup video including flashing the PiStorm etc.
PiStorm32's firmware update is with Emu68. This is different from the original PiStorm. PiStorm16 is the new WIP update for 16-bit Amigas.
Nice video, now I need a beer
Great vídeo and happy New year CRG
Happy new year and sorry for the late reply.
@@CRG thanks
maybe The FULL version of PCx v1.1 was included on Amiga Format CD-ROM 50 or dosbox amiga port
Dosbox would be a good idea. If I'm honest I didn't even know there was an Amiga port, I'll have to try it.
FYI, Emu68 emulates all the 68K (68000 to 68040) instructions but it reports as 68040. Emu68 doesn't need the usual 68040.library.
Emu68's built-in 68040.library is to satisfy some later build AmigaOS checks that complain about the missing 68040.library. Emu68 is following for Vampire AC68080's wide band 68K instruction set support.
Hi, nice video. About the slowish graphics. The Amiga user planar graphics, while the PC uses chunky graphics and planar, my guess is the emulator is "running" at those 96MHz, but when writing to screen it has to go all through some kind of translation of chunky to planar, and that is quite slow because involves extracting bits and packing them in a different way. The zeroes in the benchmark is probably an overflow.
You may well be correct. With the few titles I got working though it certainly can power it's way through it but granted the video side is seemingly the bottleneck.
Bravo !!!!. Excellent video with all the questions on the table. I have tried for many years the possibility to run a system more elegant than windows and i mean Linux of course. All the time in almost the test i broke the partition ana in some cases all the Amigas partitions. It is a nice emulator but difficult to have for sure a cool solution. I think your pistorm has the power to make this try again. There are plenty of different linux systems and i believe that there is someone for us in the corner . Many friends told me not to try solutions like that because they believe it is best to use original operating 68k solutions . But for me is better than having all the HD occupied with only one operating system. So the solution with pctask is better choice because you cann made many different systems in your drive .
It never even crossed my mind to try Linux but that's certainly an interesting idea. I'm surprised by how compatible the emulator is, other than the few issues I had it's very compatible. You can even install 95 on it although to do so I'd need to get a CD drive hooked up to the Amiga.
@@CRG Not at all. You can Mkdir filename inside your dos partition and copy all windows files there . Let say winsetup the filename. And start the install from there . PcTask has some tools to transfer files between pctask and amiga partitions.
I have an Amiga1200 with blizzard 1260.+128 mb ram. I have tried dos5 , dos6.22 , win3.1 ,. Win95 , win98,. XP1 , CalderaXP Linux Debian (mepis) , Lykoris , Knoppix3.1 , puppy linux from 3.01 - 4.00 and a lot of others. Until yet nothing special happens 😂😂
@@johnnydreamwarior that's the one thing I can get to work. The package I downloaded from aminet doesn't have the required hardfile.device. I did find a copy in an old eab thread but it didn't work. The software reports the file is mounted, I can see TCC: on the ram disk but I can't access it.
@@CRG The answear to your question is that PcTask 3.1 is free and they have put this program inside CU Amiga Magazine's super CD-ROM 17. I think aminet must have a copy and another one copy is i think in AF134 March 2000 i am not sure exactly but dont have more infos
I don't know how I feel about running MS Dos on an Amiga while running a Pi as a CPU. I will probably stick to the 50 MHz 68030 instead to improve the speed of various Amiga titles. A very interesting video though. It's exciting to see what enthusiasts come up with for this capable 7.2mhz machine.
You know I had a similar thought while playing Curse of Monkey Island on ScummVM over RTG. Is this even Amiga?
I've still got my other Amigas with all the genuine hardware driving them but it is fun to play with the PiStorm. It being so cheap just makes it so accessible.
As for the question though it's something I've given a lot of thought lately and I really struggle to put an answer to it, what makes any platform what it is... I suppose it's something we all need to answer for ourselves. I decided to just not think about it too hard and settle for the fact that it's a pi driving my Amiga but it's still an Amiga.
@@CRG True. I stuck with the great 030 based upgrades available for this Amiga titles that simply needed a boost. Regarding Quake and other titles on Amiga? I rather play Gloom and Alienbreed 3D accelerated or the recent Doom Cline that runs decently even on stock hardware.
@@CRG amiga was it's OS, but it got all muddled up with the hardware, as a good example, if you could shoe-horn in a the big box Amiga graphic cards, and it worked, would it still be an AMIGA, with all the desktop work space, with and a top end midi sound card, is it still an a AMIGA's ?
I would like to see PiStorm running DosBoxRTG
There is DOSBOX port for Amiga you try.
That bit of Quake at the start is unreasonably fast, good lord. :PPP
It's absolutely flying along isn't it 😃
Very interesting :)
The more i think about the baremetal version "emu68" makes sense.
It is in a sense like some modern CPU core today. Some x86 chips today actually translate CISC to RISC at its core. We first saw this in 1995 with the Pentium Pro, P6.
Perhaps if Motorola had followed suit, they too would have adopted this technique.
68060 has dual 68K CISC-to-RISC decoders, but FPU wasn't pipelined.
AMD K5 has quad X86 CISC-to-RISC decoders with AMD's Am29000 RISC-like core. K5's quad X86 CISC-to-RISC decoders was limited by dual ALU layout and internal bus between L1 cache to decoders.
Transmeta solution has a firmware-based X86 emulator for VLIW CPU core.
AmigaOne PowerPC UBoot includes an X86 emulator to initialize the x86 PC VGA BIOS.
NVIDIA Project Denver is the codename of a microarchitecture designed by Nvidia that implements the ARMv8-A 64/32-bit instruction sets using a combination of simple hardware decoder and software-based binary translation (dynamic recompilation) where "Denver's binary translation layer runs in software, at a lower level than the operating system, and stores commonly accessed, already optimized code sequences in a 128 MB cache stored in main memory".
Project Denver was originally intended to support both ARM and x86 code using code morphing technology from Transmeta, but was changed to the ARMv8-A 64-bit instruction set because Nvidia could not obtain a license to Intel's patents.
interpretive is THE WAY for windows. I am running complete MS office from Win 3.1 (Excel, Word,,Powerpoint)
Your early Landmark scores are wrong sadly. The counters are wrapping. Probably a few hundred times. :) My 486 overclocked with an S3 805 pops along at 21,000. Enjoy your work. Keep it up!
Ahh... so the initial test was going so fast the 0mhz score is just the benchmark overflowing?
Haven't tried emu68 just yet however if your Pizero has wifi, you can simply sftp files over to it. It's what I've been doing
Emu68 unfortunately doesn't work like that. It's a bare metal emulator and isn't running Linux underneath. The Amiga partitions are physically on the SD card rather than hdf files.
how about the early versions of Lotus 123 which ran in assembler .. would it run that and if so how fast would it calculate?
can the Amiga 500 or such emulate pc-task and then run ms Windows 95 or 98se?? thanks...........
yep try it with DOSBox RTG :)
That's a good idea!
rewatching this brinigs up the question: how do you create the pc-task hardfile? are their any readily downloadable? its easy enough to move a large file onto the pi over ftp/wifi on its local pio fat 32 disk. PC TASK hasn't worked on pistorm for me under emu68, so that's that. Probably some obscure setting.
It's been a while since I done it but as I recall you create the pc-task hardfile from within pc-task. I think you do it in the bottom left of the screen, select the size and give it a name.
I don't think you can access the fat32 disk remotely while using emu68. I think you'd need to remove the SD card to move files.
Interesting seeing a A500+ with a keyboard with a fat return key and red power light. They usually have the small return and the green/amber power/disk lights
I think this system was made from pieces. I originally purchased it a couple of year ago as a spares and repairs unit. It never had the top shield and the CPU wasn't in the socket when it came.
I actually bought it with the intention of making it a vampire rig. Glad I held out and went with the PiStorm instead.
what speed is the pi? thanks.........
You filthy casual retro gamer.
which dos program is at 16:23 ?
One interesting idea: what if the PiStorm was used to emulate an i386 alongside the m68k? Basically emulate a Bridgeboard on top of the ARM...
I suppose anything is possible although the folk working on the pistorm are concentrating on the Amiga stuff. If I had a wish for it, it would be to make the usb accessibly within Amiga OS. Would be very handy for transferring files or even using modern peripherals.
@@CRG well everything on the pi is acceptable from the 68k side, just need someone to write 68k usb driver stuff for it.
Like
Perhaps this version of pistorm doesn't have the fpu emulated(sysinfo), which is odd since it had run quake
I asked this question myself and was told the fpu is implemented. It's supposedly something to do with how sysinfo runs it's test.
It runs everything I've thrown at it though. Quake, Duke3D, ScummVM etc. Still in early development though so will only get better.
@@CRG I've seen on Michalz' sysinfo the fpu being shown
@@CRG perhaps you could try to emulate a FPUless CPU in winuae to check how it behaves
What Raspi are you using? How did you manage to squeeze 900 mips out of it? For me, it stops at around 400 mips
Just running a Pi3A. The speed is down to Emu68. You can grab the latest build from the discord channel.
@@CRG I have the latest builds, but maybe it's because I have the MAXV CPLD, I heard there are some issues with this.
I remember playing a shareware game called 'Solar Winds' in PC-Task on my Amiga back then. Don't remember if it was with the 030 or later with the 060, though. :)
Unless it was a very early game it just have been on the 060. Running on the 030 in my 1200 pc task is a bit slow.
i dont quite get it though - how come your running a pi within the Amiga 500 ? thanks.....
The pi is connected to the Amiga via the pistorm board. This sits in the 68000 cpu socket and (for the case of the emu68 software) emulates an extremely fast 68040 processor.
It's your underlying Amiga filesystem. PC-Task (and other software that does low-level disk translation like ShapeShifter) tend to prefer FFS. A comparison between PC-Task and Dosbox performance would be good. I think Dosbox can run Win95. Nice vid!
Yes I've came to that conclusion myself. I'm going to pull a quick video together showing setting up emu68 so when doing that I'll create a FFS partition, maybe just make DH0 FFS and leave the large partition DH1 PFS3.
yes, but why is it writing "£!$"!$£%!"£$ data in the first place, it should only be read the data?
Which AmigaOS Version are you running?
On that build I'm running 3.9
So an 8086 emulator running on a 68000 emulator running on a risc processor..
pity 1 of the amiga ports of DosBox cant take advantage of the Pi/Emu68 side of things.
It's something I need to try, dosbox, and may actually be a better option since it's still maintained.
Do you have a guide on setting up mac os to run on a pistorm as well ?
I don't sorry, the Macintosh range of computers are one that I'm not that familiar with although I have couple of Mac projects in the pipeline.
how did you get a boot disk working for pc task its an absolute nightmare without a real pc drive or amiga drive
I can't remember for certain but I think for this one I used an external disk drive on the Amiga with a 720kb double density dos disk.
@@CRG i figured, the whole thing relies on someone having access to a floppy disk
Use shapeshifter and get a MSDOS emulator for Mac
it's turtles all the way down.
I wanted to see PC Task on a PiStorm/Emu68k.
Thanks for an interesting video! As much as i try i am confused with preparing the SD for Emu68. Default pistorm is easy. If i ever manage to pepare the SD, how would i begin transfering files to the Amiga hard disk part? I think wifi on the Pi is not working with Emu68?
There is no access to the pis WiFi with emu68.
To transfer files on the Amigas partitions of the SD card, the easiest method is to mount the card on your PC and use WinUAE.
In the coming weeks I will be pulling together a video showing how to setup emu68, keep an eye out for that if you can.
@@CRG Thanks for replying! I finally managed through some guide i found, although not having Win 10 made it a bit difficult!
I wonder if there's a way to get the rpi to handle the x86 emulation too? ( I mean that more academically, I understand the software you were using was THE emulator, but ... still just wonder if there's a way to do it)
I'm sure with time anything would be possible. Understandably though the teams are working on perfecting the 68k emulation first.
that's insane, way faster than a Vampire too?
Yeah certainly for the titles I've tried it clocks in a lot faster than what the vampire can do and at a fraction of the price.
That's not to take away from the great work the vampire team have done but it's hard to ignore just how fast emu68 on the pistorm can be.
How does AMAME run on emu68?
I haven't tried it myself yet but from what I've seen it runs really well.
It makes me wonder how much one of those Pi Storms would do in a A4000-060... Or if that's even possible.
It's currently not possible although I know a version for the 1200 is on the works. Maybe one for the 4000 will follow after.
Refer to Z3660 project.
if it can run Duke Nukem 3D so fast on an emulator, its pretty fast, this Pi
Duke Nukem that I showed at the end isn't running under the DOS emulation but rather it's an Amiga version of the game running on the pi emulating the 68040 processor only.
@@CRG oh, ok them, Obviously I was skipping the video as I am watching it during working hours :) Still nice to see 040 doing such a wonderful job.
If someone had the energy to do so they could probably make the pistorm act like a pc compability card.
Possibly, anything is possible when talking about emulation.
Good thing there is not WinUAE release for Windows 3.0, or else you would have gotten stuck in an endless simulation loop.
The Amiga version is the best for Monkey Island !
Great video. Did you ever find an adapter for the pos mini pc? I managed to find one I can send you the info if your interested, how can I contact you?
I never did but if you have a link you can email it to me casualretrogamer@outlook.com
can this Amiga 500 run ms windows 95 or 98 se ????? thanks.........
You might be able to get 95 going on it, not sure about 98. Ideally though you'd have the original pc task disks as some elements of it are missing from this version from aminet.
@@CRGok thanks i saw ms windows 3.11 being run on Amiga 1200 using calmira software etc but i was wondering i dont think windows 95 can be run at all! !!!!! thanks....
Emulating an 486 on an 68k which is emulated on an ARM is kinda wanky. Don't get me wrong, as a proof of concept it is fun but after all in Real Life one would rather run DOSBOX directly on ARM or even use Windows for ARM which new x86/amd64 Emulator is BLAZING fast.
It was just for the fun of it. One of those why not, lets see if it works things.
oh no. no more "phone me" message??
You didn‘t try a DOS C64 emulator???? What is wrong with you? :D
Probably should have at least tried a C64 emulator. Maybe when I do a more in-depth look emu68.
@@CRG To be clear: I meant a C64 emulator running on MS-DOS running on PC-Task running on an Amiga with emulated 680x0 running on an ARM system. Could I be any clearer? :D
Ahh yes I get what you mean now. Might try another level of emulation just for a laugh.
how is the speed compared to running dos directly on the PI, with free dos or dosbox?
Not sure to be honest, I've never tried dosbox directly on a pi. Never really done much with a pi to be honest, Linux has always been a bit of mystery to me.
At a guess though I'd say dosbox running natively on the pi would be considerably faster since it's not running through another layer of emulation.
If you haven’t done so already then Abandonware is a useful term to search for 🙂
That looks like a 286processor, that cant use protected mode..
If only the emulation of the PC/MS-DOS would run on the Pi itself... in the same way as the A2088 or similar bridgeboards would add an x86 to the system, or the KCS Power PC Board which added a NEC V30 processor; in short, it needs a Emu86
Emu86 on the second ARM CPU as emulated X86 Bridgeboard. What about BlizzardPPCemu?
C'mon, VGA IS NOT 640x200, it is 640x480, or 320x240. Double this for 640x480. Then you get to SVGA starting with 800x600.
is there an easy way to access hardfiles?
ADFOpus can open and interrogate HDF hardfiles. adfopus.sourceforge.net/
Its older software but works fine even within windows 11. The first time you run it though it'll throw a registry error but just ignore that.
@@CRG I was talking those of pc-task
@@vertigoz oh yeah that would make more sense 😂. There is meant to be a program included with PC Task 4 that can open the PC Task hardfile within workbench but I have never been able to get it to work. The version of PC Task 4 on aminet I don't believe is complete. Rather it appears to be a copy of someones installation rather than the original installation disks.
@@CRG indeed, there's some devices missing and dosdrivers
@@CRG I use CoffeineOS for preconfigured PCTask 4.4 with hardfile mount on Workbench.
for ms emulation, you might be better running mac emulator and in that running a pc emulator, I believe you get a faster pc and be able to run windows 95-98
An interesting idea, shape shifter is something I've never used, never really been that big of a mac fan but it might be worth a try.
my last real amiga was in 95. But been playing with all sorts of emulators since
Try mk3
I've run Bochs on Macs....the opposite of fun
Brutally pointless. I loved it :)
The best kind of pointless 😂.
I think 040 is the main problem, this CPU isn't fully compatible with previous versions. So better try 030.
I'm not sure if you can change the CPU emulation in emu68.
I wonder how it handles 68040.library on the Amiga side. Different versions of this going back to 1993.
can it handle IEEE754 Numbers.
Yo dawg, I heard you like emulators...
Nothing wrong with an emulator. Gets a bit crazy though when you have an emulator, emulating and emulator lol.
Maybe you could run Windows, then fire up UAE and emulate an Amiga!!!
Funnily enough I had to do that to setup the emulated PC hardfile to use on the real Amiga.
Why do we do these things, no good reason that I can think of other than because we can.
@@CRG it's like some kind of new russian doll situation
Some MSDOS files require a 80387 for them to run at all.
Is there anything specific you can think off that I could try? Would be interesting to see if and how well the emulator handles the fpu.
@@CRG It needs to handle IEEE754 format numbers which are...
union{
long double WHOLE;
struct{
unsigned long long int MANTISSA:64;
unsigned long long int EXPONENT:15;
unsigned long long int NEGATIVE:1;
unsigned long long int PACKING:48;
}SPLIT;
}KEY;
Doesn't like a soft 80387
Emulation Inception.
Emulator, emulating an emulator 😁
Wasting time to put a pi inside a shitty Amiga. Why don't emulate all both DOS and Amiga straight from Pi. What slightly disappointed? U put a 21st centuries Pi inside a 1980's stone age computer, what u expect?
Emu68 doesn't emulate the Amiga chipset and is not hosted on Linux which makes Emu68 the fastest 68K emulator for ARM Cortex A53 and A72.
UAE on Linux and ARM Cortex A53 or A72 wouldn't beat Emu68 running on the same ARM hardware. Emu68 is "bare metal" 68K emulator designed for the fastest translation speed for ARM Cortex A53 or A72.
On translation speed, Emu68 on ARM Cortex A53 will beat TheA500mini's UAE on ARM Cortex A53. Bare metal is real.