pico-xt — old good PC/XT on Murmulator

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

We will skip the questions like "Why do you even need this Murmulator?" here, as this device falls into the category of "hobby", and its usefulness can only be compared to other hobbies like stamp or coin collecting. However, some manage to include assembling the Murmulator with their own hands into the work of a radio club. But that's another story.

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

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

XMS implementation in pico-xt is not available, as it requires at least an 80386 processor for proper implementation, but some truncated XMS logic is still present in the emulator, allowing DOS to address HMA and UMB.

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

VGA and EGA modes on pico-xt are very limited (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 very poor. But! The firmware developer has provided support for TGA, which, in turn, is supported by almost all games of those years.

For example, the cult Prince of Persia runs in VGA mode:

The sound in pico-xt is also fine - Tandy Sound and Disney Sound Source are emulated. That is, games that ran on Tandy 1000 (XT clone) will run on the emulator. Sound Blaster support has not yet been added ((.

Wolf 3D can also be run, but only in TGA mode (wolf3d tandy), and it is even relatively playable:

For CP/M fans - it can also be run on pico-xt:

The latest version of the emulator is available here: https://github.com/xrip/pico-xt/releases

The Murmulator itself: https://murmulator.ru/types

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