Since late-2020, it has been possible to emulate PC Prevue, the third major revision of (although seemingly offered as an alternative to) the Prevue Channel software.
This guide is meant as an overall tutorial for setting up PC Prevue on virtualized and physical environments. In addition, I wrote a tutorial for getting it set up in DOSBox(-X), while tobskep contributed a tutorial for settoing it up with QEMU.
Assuming you already know have an environment (virtual or otherwise) to run PC Prevue, installing is very straightforward. There are a few different installer packages available:
Once downloaded, extract, put onto your virtual environment or whatever, and click install.bat
(run as administrator in newer Windows versions). It should put everything where it needs to be.
Before you can start PC Prevue, you might see an error upon startup:
PC Prevue receives data over serial, therefore requiring a serial port to start the software whatsoever. All accessible ports are defined within pcepgsys.ini. In particular, you are looking for the BaseBand section:
[BaseBand] ; Config parameters for the BaseBand device
Mode=2400,n,8,1
Handshaking=None
CommPort=2
MaxLines=100
Depending on your computer’s configuration, you might need to modify the value of CommPort
before you can launch PC Prevue.
To view a list of serial ports in Windows:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SERIALCOMM
mode
command.Once you have identified an available COM port, go back to the pcepgsys.ini file and change CommPort
to the number of your specified COM port. When done, save the file.
C:\Windows
, or to have Notepad open as Administrator.From there, you should be able to launch PC Prevue successfully.
I already wrote guides for various programs and utilities (currently only PrevueCLI) to provide the Prevue Channel software with data, as this section assumes you have the software and data you want to use prepared.
The first thing you will see upon starting up PC Prevue (if you get into the software without the port error) is “No data. Call for download.” within the grid.
Sending listings from another machine (or your host OS to a guest OS) is simple. All you need is a serial port (or adapter) and a serial cable (unless you are virtualizing).
If you are virtualizing PC Prevue, you may need to make some modifications to your virtual machine’s configuration to get data over:
VirtualBox: Serial settings are accesible within the virtual machine’s settings window.
VMware: First, make sure all VMware software is closed. Then, add the following lines to your virtual machine’s .vmx file:
serial0.startConnected = "TRUE" <br/>
serial0.fileType = "pipe" <br/>
serial0.fileName = "/tmp/serial2" <br/>
serial0.tryNoRxLoss = "TRUE" <br/>
serial0.present = "TRUE" <br/>
(you may need to replace the number in serial0.fileName
with a different port depending on setup.)
Save the file, then relaunch VMware.
QEMU: In your QEMU command, add a line utilizing the -serial
option:
qemu-system-x86_64 \
...
-serial telnet:localhost:4321,server,nowait \
...
DOSBox: Under the serial section of your DOSBox configuration, change the dummy
value under serial2
to nullmodem port:1234
.