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   linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Aug-2024 00:25:30 JST linear cannon

   86box is the far and away the best pc emulator that exists and i am glad it is around
   
   it is still not quite accurate enough for some of the stuff i do, but it is awfully close
   
   and where it is too inaccurate for me, i don't blame it - i actually contributed changes to make it accurate in the respects i care about, and they were accepted, but then reverted because it was far too much overhead. and that was the right call

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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Aug-2024 00:25:51 JST linear cannon

     in reply to

     it is really cool that i can emulate, to a surprising degree of accuracy, most of the old PC systems i have, and close analogues for the ones i can't emulate exactly, and the only real measurable difference is in extremely niche FPU timing details

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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Aug-2024 00:26:08 JST linear cannon

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     and also marginally faster execution than real hardware since memory latency effects are also not accounted for, which again, i don't think is really much of an issue unless you're doing something really strange like trying to hyper-optimize quake for 486 processors

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 22-Aug-2024 01:16:29 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @linear Playing around with it and wow I quite like it, I think the only bit I miss is like ability to store the settings in a file so you can easily use it for different systems.
     Monitor_1_20240821-181448-477.png
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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Aug-2024 01:18:13 JST linear cannon

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     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me oh, it does do that, it's just weird. it uses the directory you launch it in to store the config files. i have an ~/86box directory with subdirectories for each machine i have set up and i just cd to the directory before launching it. there are probably better ways but tbh i'm perfectly happy with managing it this way

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 22-Aug-2024 01:18:51 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to
     @linear Ah well… good enough I guess
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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Thursday, 22-Aug-2024 01:20:32 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
     @linear Also I love how the beep from it is the good old quiet boop rather than the loud beep you get on modern machines.
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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Aug-2024 01:22:14 JST linear cannon

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     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me the beep you get will depend on what machine you have set up, just like in real life! different machines with different bioses will do it differently
     
     also fun fact, the initial support for the Hyundai Super-286C was contributed by me, with the ROM dumped from my actual machine

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     linear cannon (linear@nya.social)'s status on Thursday, 22-Aug-2024 01:23:16 JST linear cannon

     in reply to

     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me the details of the keyboard controller are different but it's better off for that, and in fact now matches the behavior of my real machine since i replaced the weird buggy keyboard controller with a more normal one

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