Hi,
I was wondering what is a relatively easy way to run Mychess at the speed for which it was originally designed (I believe this would have been an original IBM PC with an 8088 processor running at 4.77 Mhz).
I have tried DOSBox for Windows, and although I can configure it to play at the same speed it would have on the original IBM PC, I lose the "beep" functionality.
I've also looked for 8088 CPU / IBM 5150 PC emulators on the net without much success. Microsoft Virtual PC seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to use one legacy application, though I have heard that does work. Maybe that is not as involved as I thought?
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Best way to run Mychess at the original speed (emulation)
Moderators: hgm, Rebel, chrisw
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Alainza
Re: Best way to run Mychess at the original speed (emulation
Hi Jonathan
Best regards,
Alain
Virtual PC virtualizes the hardware to allow you to run an operating system inside another one but the goal is not to revive the good old days and therefore there is no way to slow down the vitual machine.JonP01 wrote: Microsoft Virtual PC seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to just to use one legacy application, though I have heard that does work. Maybe that is not as involved as I thought?
Best regards,
Alain
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Bill Rogers
- Posts: 3562
- Joined: Thu Mar 09, 2006 3:54 am
- Location: San Jose, California
Re: Best way to run Mychess at the original speed (emulation
JonPO1
Why would you want to handicap MyChess? I still own an 386 pc with speed controll built in. It runs great on that but it also runs great on one of my laptops which runs at 1 gigahertz.
Bill
Why would you want to handicap MyChess? I still own an 386 pc with speed controll built in. It runs great on that but it also runs great on one of my laptops which runs at 1 gigahertz.
Bill
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JonP01
Re: Best way to run Mychess at the original speed (emulation
Hi Alain,
I did actually try out Virtual PC today, but that was before I realised I could not actually emulate an authentic IBM DOS environment at 4.77 Mhz
I guess I should have realised this before trying it. Thanks also for the detailed info you gave me. I will have a look at that notwithstanding, although since I run Windows 2000, I can't use Virtual PC 2007.
Bill,
The reason for wishing to handicap Mychess are twofold. Firstly, it was specifically written to run on the IBM PC, meaning at the time it was almost as hardware specific as a dedicated machine. So authenticity is a goal here.
The second reason is rather more straight forward. I want to play the program against some of my dedicated machines, since the Mychess program is pretty much the same (and almost identical in speed if run on the correct hardware or hardware emulation) as the Novag Savant Royale (the 8088 at 4.77 Mhz being extremely close in performance to the Z80 at 7.5 Mhz).
In order to make the competition fair, I have to have Mychess running with the original horsepower, since the program and the dedicated machines think in their opponent's time. It would thus be unfair to have a dedicated machine playing Mychess without hardware emulation on the latter, since not only will the dedicated machine not have a demonstrable benefit from thinking on it's opponent's time, but Mychess on the other hand would get an absolutely massive advantage.
I've roughly calculated that on my PC, Mychess runs perhaps 10,000 times as fast as it would have on the original IBM PC (I tried a utility called Moslo which could slow the CPU on DOS applications to 0.31% original CPU speed, but it was still roughly 30 times too fast after doing that). That's what you get with the changes in architecture over the years, as opposed to just increases in clock speed. Therefore 3 minutes pondering time for Mychess without the hardware handicap is like giving it nearly 21 days to think (on it's original hardware) whilst it's opponent makes it's move, as opposed to the few seconds that the dedicated would get to ponder whilst Mychess is thinking. So needless to say, if Mychess were actually able to make proper use of all that time, it would be playing at an incredible ELO relatively speaking in those particular situations where it correctly predicts the move of the dedicated machine. And the dedicated machine, on the other hand, would lose ELO points from it's nominal rating, since thinking on one's opponent's time does add ELO points generally speaking. These factors would almost certainly distort the results over a series of games and in consequence they would not really be meaningful to me.
Jonathan
I did actually try out Virtual PC today, but that was before I realised I could not actually emulate an authentic IBM DOS environment at 4.77 Mhz
I guess I should have realised this before trying it. Thanks also for the detailed info you gave me. I will have a look at that notwithstanding, although since I run Windows 2000, I can't use Virtual PC 2007.Bill,
The reason for wishing to handicap Mychess are twofold. Firstly, it was specifically written to run on the IBM PC, meaning at the time it was almost as hardware specific as a dedicated machine. So authenticity is a goal here.
The second reason is rather more straight forward. I want to play the program against some of my dedicated machines, since the Mychess program is pretty much the same (and almost identical in speed if run on the correct hardware or hardware emulation) as the Novag Savant Royale (the 8088 at 4.77 Mhz being extremely close in performance to the Z80 at 7.5 Mhz).
In order to make the competition fair, I have to have Mychess running with the original horsepower, since the program and the dedicated machines think in their opponent's time. It would thus be unfair to have a dedicated machine playing Mychess without hardware emulation on the latter, since not only will the dedicated machine not have a demonstrable benefit from thinking on it's opponent's time, but Mychess on the other hand would get an absolutely massive advantage.
I've roughly calculated that on my PC, Mychess runs perhaps 10,000 times as fast as it would have on the original IBM PC (I tried a utility called Moslo which could slow the CPU on DOS applications to 0.31% original CPU speed, but it was still roughly 30 times too fast after doing that). That's what you get with the changes in architecture over the years, as opposed to just increases in clock speed. Therefore 3 minutes pondering time for Mychess without the hardware handicap is like giving it nearly 21 days to think (on it's original hardware) whilst it's opponent makes it's move, as opposed to the few seconds that the dedicated would get to ponder whilst Mychess is thinking. So needless to say, if Mychess were actually able to make proper use of all that time, it would be playing at an incredible ELO relatively speaking in those particular situations where it correctly predicts the move of the dedicated machine. And the dedicated machine, on the other hand, would lose ELO points from it's nominal rating, since thinking on one's opponent's time does add ELO points generally speaking. These factors would almost certainly distort the results over a series of games and in consequence they would not really be meaningful to me.
Jonathan
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Werner
- Posts: 2871
- Joined: Wed Mar 08, 2006 10:09 pm
- Location: Germany
- Full name: Werner Schüle
Re: Best way to run Mychess at the original speed (emulation
Why not running it on C64 emulation?
Werner
Werner