Using a method known as virtualisation back in the heady days of large symmetric mainframe systems, it was common for resources to be better optimised by taking the multiprocessor system and through virtualisation dedicating different installations of the operating systems to run against one of the available processors. Over the years as accessible computing has made vast inroads into our every day lives, and inexorably the cogitative abilities of the humble home or office PC have increased.
The idea of spreading the disparate abilities of the hardware behind this revolution has become more of a reality, and will become something everyone will invisibly benefit from in the coming years. Taking the concept of virtualisation, which separates the hardware of a computer and in simple terms allows it to be seen by more than one operating system. This can be stepped up to another level called Emulation. An emulated system provides an environment in which whatever is running within it is oblivious to the physical hardware and native operating system of the computer.
There is a trade off to be made through this. While on the one hand you can use the software emulator to create a map between the physical system architecture and that of the virtual, this in itself is less than ideal, notably from a performance perspective. The physical processor in the computer not only has to manage it's own native operating system, but also the virtual operating system and the mapping or substitution of the architectural calls made by the virtual system.
The overall result of this is that substantially more powerful underlying processing hardware is needed to maintain performance between all three components. If that wasn't enough, you then have to consider the other inflated system requirements such as RAM, video and storage. The most wide spread use of Emulation in the consumer market comes from the games console and legacy platform sector. Remember those classic arcade games from your childhood?
The chances are that an emulator already exists to allow you to run those games directly onto your Handheld PC. Admittedly the usefulness of this is trivial and you will find, depending on your targeted console that emulators operate with varying degrees of success. Given that there is already precedence for emulation in the Windows CE world, the fact that eventually someone tried it with the IBM PC architecture isn't all that surprising… but it did take some gall. BOCHS is an open source development project dating back to If at this point you are scratching your head wondering why on earth anyone would want to emulate a CPU type that you have never heard of, perhaps the IA32's colloquial name of x86 or i will make things clearer.
The release failed to make much of an impression, on any side of the Windows CE community, with little to no commentary subsequently. There is one common fact that time and time again prevails in all the discussion on the Pocket PC port, and is undoubtedly its Achilles heel.
The 1. The interface is made up of sequences of numerically driven menus, each driving you down further into the application configuration options and inevitably into some very high level environmental settings which the vast majority of general users will never likely see again during their IT lives. With no online help available with the application - though the documentation on the BOCHS sourceforge website remains largely applicable - and little to no prompting on what additional options are valid for multi choice selections aside from the default; usually [none].
Wading through the configuration menus to build you initial emulator profile is somewhat time consuming, but there are no shortcuts in this, you simply have to spend the time doing it and be prepared to undertake the research on any terminology you're not up to speed with. Unlike most emulators, which are preconfigured and come with predefined layers of core system functionality, BOCHS, even with a fully configured configuration file is still an unusable blank canvas.
Attempt to initialise the emulator and BOCHS will drop you back to the command prompt with advice completely at odds with that afforded to us by the author Douglas Adams. Buried within that revelation, is BOCHS's way of telling you that you're missing two vital pieces of software. Both of these components will ordinarily be found mounted in some fashion on your computers motherboard. Locate both files, plug them with paths into your BOCHS configuration and finally you will have a fully configured emulation environment.
It just doesn't do anything yet. This access is completely virtualised, and provides no path into the Windows CE file system, or mounting capabilities for using attached storage devices as additional drives. You are also unable to switch mounted volumes ad-hoc; meaning virtually ejecting a CD to insert another one is not an option.
Only one of the 10 possible devices can be set as the boot device, and must be manually specified in the configuration file. BOCHS reads standard. IMA images, the same found on bootdisk. Follow the on-screen directions to install Windows. You will need to reboot during the installation.
I was prompted for a boot floppy, but only the CD was actually needed. E-Maculation wiki. Installing Windows 98 SE in Bochs. Show pagesource. Old revisions. Recent Changes.
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