I had a look at this PCem, it indeed looks interesting, but where is the documentation ? Since there is no interface, how do you want to use this without any documentation ?!!! Even in the forum there is no basic documentation, no default configuration file, nothing, it's quite extreme ! I found the github repository containing all the bioses but they are useless without a minimum set of documentation...
If you have a link on how to start using this thing, I am interested... !
Ok, understood, you need the windows version to get the interface, the guys who wrote this are heavily addicted to microsoft... ! But the good news is that it runs fine in wine, and so I can create the config file this way ! Crappy way to do things though... !
After testing on a pentium2-300 with pcem (splendid emulation of the machine this time, this emulator is really THE emulator for dos), gunbird2 runs perfectly with a solid 60 fps. I saw a zooming problem during the intro, specific to this dos version (the flying carpet man while he approaches), I don't know why, but at least it runs smoothly with a serious margin, even with sound (soundblaster 16, 22 Khz).
For reference, this sh2 runs at 57/2 MHz, but with almost all instructions taking only 1 cycle (risc), so I'd say it's equivalent to at least twice this frequency for a "normal" cpu. Which means good emulation, raine honor is safe ! I thought about trying some heavy optimizations on this one, I didn't want to do it first because the driver would loose in readability and I didn't think it would make a big difference. After this test I am sure I don't need to do it !
Thanks for the info on pcem though, not sure it will be useful soon because maintaining the dos version today would be crazy as I said, but it's good to know there is a way to test this properly.
For info the linux version sucks, no configuration manager which makes it useless alone, and when I try to run it with the config created in wine, it just crashes without any message. As I said these guys are heavily addicted to microsoft, but their program is good anyway (the windows version!)
The only advantage of dosbox is that you don't need to create a disk image, but the emulation is less precise for sure on this kind of thing, I could even select a mach 64 gx to have 2d acceleration and then run univbe on it using pcem, quite impressive, even if I was limited to 512x384 16bpp for this test, but it was enough (and the resolutions < 512x384 in 8bpp are all broken in vesa3 for some reason, it seems their emulation isn't totally perfect here). But all this is quite impressive compared to what we had so far !
edit : PCem being quite fascinating to use, I fixed the crash in 8bpp, and the black sprites in 16 bpp for the dos version, this was just that color depths other than 32bpp were badly handled, and 8bpp was crashing because of an overflow in the color map. It's likely that other 24bpp games have problems in 8bpp in dos then, maybe I'll check that later. About 60% cpu free during most the intro on a pentium2-300 in 8bpp, I'd say it runs quite well ! The colors look a little pale in 8bpp, it's normal, it's the effect of the color conversion to fit all this in a 256 colors palette, switch to 16 bpp if you want bright colors !
I didn't find a way to mount directly a vhd in linux yet, I found something on the net about that but it doesn't seem to work, so I work on the vdi used by virtualbox, and then convert it to vhd for PCem using some virtualbox tool, really sub-optimal, but even if that's quite a lot of steps, it's quick to do and manageable.
Oh well, I think I'll be able to stop here for now !
The proper way to mount a vhd in linux : https://devicetests.com/mount-virtual-hard-disk-ubuntu (method 1 works perfectly).