UPDATE: Official rules are here:
https://tasvideos.org/EmulatorResources/PCem#MovieSubmissions
We finally started working on getting
libTAS+
PCem approved for submission, and we're starting with
DOS. The goal is running DOS games in PCem that's hooked into libTAS, and that's on either Linux or Windows+
WSL2. That way you will be able to TAS DOS games without having to rely on emulation hacks (think DOSBox) or poor savestates (libTAS captures state of the entire program it runs). The cost is having to set up the environment though. But if PCem is ever supported in bizhawk, we'll already have the setup figured out by then.
What we want is to officially provide 3 emulated hardware configurations for PCem, to cover 3 eras of DOS games: late 80s, early 90s, and late 90s. Early 80s would be harder, because games weren't all that appealing back then, and PCem doesn't emulate the turbo button, but as a lower priority, maybe we come up with something later, as a 4th config. We will create packages including PCem config files, pre-installed software we can distribute, and ideally, 99% of DOS games would work in either of those 3 packages.
That means we need to figure out what
hardware we want PCem to emulate for each of those packages, and what
software we want to pre-install (and pre-configure).
Here's a full list of what it emulates as of v17.
We want to ship FreeDOS wherever we can for this,
here's an example package slamo created for testing how well it works and whether it can cover 99% of DOS games.
For the sake of testing how well things work, you won't need Linux or libTAS,
just grab this Windows build of PCem (it includes the single-threading patch that we need for TASing, so report all the errors you get, if they're not present in
official PCem). If you're running it on Linux,
here's the branch we're relying on, the build steps are mentioned in the readme.
EDIT:
https://github.com/TASEmulators/pcem/releases
TL;DR: What would be the most compatible hardware and software (that we can safely ship) required to run majority of DOS games of 3 eras - late 80s, early 90s, and late 90s?
