Windows games in retropi using RPI 3 hardware
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Is it possible to run old windows games like Captain Claw , Hercules on rpi?
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The short answer is: probably not :(
I believe Captain Claw was made for Windows XP? Looking at the system requirements for that game, I don't think the PRi 3 is powerfully enough to run that game inside of emulating Windows XP. I'm not sure which version of Hercules you are referring to but the Disney's Hercules was built to run in Windows 98 but having to emulate Windows 98 and then that game inside of it will probably slow to a crawl if it could even run at all.
Then even older PC games for MS-DOS usually runs in the DOSBox emulator in RetroPie and Windows 3.1 can be installed in DOSBox to run some Windows 3.1 games but the compatibility for any version of Windows after 3.1 aren't very good.
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Thanks, but i played Captain Claw on a 233 Mhz cpu wih 4 gb HDD running win 98, and 4 gb ram if i remember well
Hercules Disney's run on an even older pc, hp vectra vl at a 133 mhz cpu with a 2 mb l2 cache no MMX
I know about dos box on rpi but emulating win 98 in dos-box? i mean emulation in emulation i don't know how the Win will perform.
Are there any native windows emulators like wine for ubuntu ported on RPI, i read that also performs low on rpi. -
Well Windows 3.1, 95, 98 & ME all ran on top of MS-DOS so it's probably possible to install any one of those in the DOSBox emulator on the Raspberry Pi. The only thing "emulated" would be MS-DOS but it will be running Windows inside of DOS which would be emulated so that factor would slow it down. Also you run into the problem of finding all the device drivers for graphics and sound and network. The other problem is the Raspberry Pi uses an ARM processors (like what's in most android cell phones) and WINE emulator works with the Intel/AMD x86/64 processor family but hasn't really be updated to take advantage of the ARM processor so it won't work on a Raspberry Pi.
I won't say that it's impossible but with the tools/code readily available the outlook is very grim but if someone with amazing hacker programming skills wanted to take on the challenge of add ARM processor support to the current WINE project, the world would be a better place :)
Now any other Windows emulators for ARM processors? I found these articles online talked about a commercial product, ExaGear Desktop, that might be able to handle this:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=111858
https://eltechs.com/run-wine-on-raspberry-pi/It might be worth installing Windows 98 to give it a try and let us know what you find out. I think there is already some tutorials out there showing how to install Windows 98 in Raspbian on a Raspberry Pi 2/3.
Also if you purchase ExaGear Desktop, please let us know if that works!
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@backstander In addition to trying to emulate games, I'd love to see a bare-bones windows setup that can run some of the arcade controls utilities for Ultimarc sticks and iPACs. That would be super handy, and performance not really a major concern.
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i know about ExaGear Desktop and i am not willing to pay 20 $ for it. Regarding installing win 98 in dos-box i will try it and give the community a sign ASAP (end of the moth, DEF). RPI has been thought as a low cost pc for kids to learn programming Linux and so on, and not for others to make money out of it.
The only concern regarding installing win is the boot loader(MBR). When running setup, first thinks is doing after running scandisk is installing the MBR so since is has no HDD and a sd card i don't know how it will perform.
Anyway i will tell you. Maybe even make a movie if it works -
@badboy1985ro I'm not sure how Dosbox handles a MBR. I know it doesn't let any programs in it access the real MBR of a HDD (or SD card). I wonder if it has some file that it just loads up like a MBR.
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you have to make a hdd image to do win95 or later and then dosbox can boot the hdd image. There's plenty of guides. I spent quite a bit of time trying to get win95 to work but it would only boot in safe mode in the end.
Win3.1 i have running and I play sim tower, sim city and all sorts of Sim games in it all the time.
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@backstander I have just try it to install it know. I can take a picture and uploaded.
Had to run seput with the "/is" parameter to ignore scandisk. It started setup but i got a error message regarding antivirus. After the first step "Preparing to run Windows 98 setup" and i reached to 100% VERY fast i got "su409" error message. some crap about antivirus and to disable it by looking in config.sys and autoexec.bat. -
@badboy1985ro said:
i played Captain Claw on a 233 Mhz cpu
The problem is, these Windows games ran on x86 architecture and the Raspberry Pi is ARM architecture, so to play x86 games on Pi there will always be some translation/emulation of the game code to run on the different hardware.
So while the Raspberry Pi is powerful enough to emulate a 3.5MHz SNES and even a 33MHz PlayStation, it is not powerful enough to emulate even a 100MHz PC very well. DOSBox on the Pi 3 seems to perform about the level of a 66MHz 486 depending on the game.
You can install earlier Windows in DOSBox with some effort, this is discussed elsewhere in the DOSBox community and VOGONs, but I suspect to play these games it will run too slow to be enjoyable.
Are there any native windows emulators like wine for ubuntu ported on RPI
Wine Is Not an Emulator, that's actually what WINE stands for, it's a programming translation layer. For example, a Windows program says "Hey windows, draw the game window here" and Wine translates that into "Hey Xorg, draw the game window here". The actual game code itself still executes natively on the CPU, and we come back to the point that x86 code cannot run on ARM CPU.
i know about ExaGear Desktop and i am not willing to pay 20 $ for it
Considering it does exactly what you want, that seems unreasonable, but okay. Your remaining options are then emulate a Windows PC on something much more powerful than a Raspberry Pi, or to play on an actual Windows PC.
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I have exagear desktop on my RPi3b and honestly it's not worth the money currently.
The biggest issue I have with it is the fact that games need to be run in a small window to even make most playable and even then results aren't great. I used it to play Deus Ex, and while i wouldnt consider it unplayable, its certain not great.
There may be better success with other games as I didnt test much aside from Deus Ex (Tried Stardew Valley but didnt have enough RAM on the Pi3)
I believe Floob did a video on Exagear, and tried out some games if you want to see an example.
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