pico-xt — good old PC

Emulators IBM PC/XT there are plenty of them on the net, but for Murmulator (https://murmulator.ru) so far there is only one: https://github.com/xrip/pico-xt.

We will bypass questions on the topic of “Why do we need this Murmulator at all?” here, because this device belongs to the “hobby” category, and in terms of usefulness can only be compared with such hobbies as collecting stamps or coins. Although, some manage to include the assembly of the Murmulator with their own hands in the work of the radio club. But that is another story.

IBM PC/XT emulator (pico-xt) on Murmulator

The emulator itself does not adhere to strict standards and simply tries to extract everything it can from the rather limited capabilities of the RP2040 microcontroller (on which the Murmulator is built). For example, the processor emulation implements some commands added only to the 80186 processor, or even 80286, so some utilities detect it incorrectly:

Norton Utilities on pico-xt - About the system — Norton Utilities on pico-xt – About the system

CheckIt on pico-xt - benchmark — CheckIt on pico-xt – benchmark

The RP2040 contains only 264 KB of memory, so a swap file has been implemented for pico-xt, which allows expanding the memory available for DOS to 640 KB, and EMS emulation (LIM 4.0) has been additionally implemented:

CheckIt on pico-xt - memory test — CheckIt on pico-xt – memory test

The XMS implementation in pico-xt is not available, because for normal implementation it requires at least 80386 processor, but some truncated XMS logic is still present in the emulator, which allows DOS to address HMA and UMB.

For owners of Murmulator v1.4, or Murmulator with external PSRAM, swap is not enabled, but external memory is used.

VGA and EGA modes on pico-xt are supported to a very limited extent (there is little memory in the microcontroller) and 90% of games will not work in them, although some utilities will detect the presence of the corresponding video adapter, and the standard PC/XT MDA and CGA are extremely poor. But! The firmware developer has provided support TGAwhich, in turn, is supported by almost all games of those years, for example, the iconic Prince of Persia:

With sound in pico-xt everything is also fine – they are emulated AdLibTandy Sound and Disney Sound Source. That is, the toys that went on Tandy 1000 (XT clone) will work on emulator too. Sound Blaster support hasn't arrived yet ((.

Wolf 3D can also be run quite well (wolf3d tandy), and it is even relatively playable: