Box86 and Wine on RPi4

retropieuser555

So I haven't been on my pi4 in quite sometime but apparently this emulator that's a modification of visualboyadvance supports local multiplayer and is a 32bit Linux version. It'd be quite cool to see if it works with box86

https://linux.softpedia.com/get/System/Emulators/VisualBoyAdvance-Link-103308.shtml

Troopaking

@retropieuser555
Why do you need box86 for a Linux app. Wine and box86 are for exe and windows files .
You can launch that linux game with a script from emulation station

Folly

@retropieuser555

Softpedia redirects to https://github.com/Jacques-Olivier/VisualBoyAdvance_Link, but that link is down.

So if you want this you have to search for the source code somewhere else.

retropieuser555

@troopaking well I haven't tested it yet but the app isn't for arm, it's a 32bit program. Which is what box86 is solving, allowing you to run 32bit programs on an arm build.

@folly ah bummer, I hadn't tried to download it yet but yeah I'll have a hunt around as I imagine it might be floating around the web somewhere, I'll take a look later on or at the weekend

ecto

Hi,
so now it happend. I couldn't resist: I opened Pandora's Box and installed Bow86/Wine.

There are some Windows games that complement my Dosbox installation perfectly, which are:

Fallout 1 & 2
Diablo 2
Privateer 2
*Dungeon Keeper 2 and
Probably some Civ (3?) or HoMM (3?).

So far I tried the first five, to some success. I've read through the whole thread to get up to date, but I might have overlooked something. What I'm struggeling with are segementation faults. I'm using the .sh approach.

For debugging purposes I'm starting the scripts for the games from the ports romdir through the shell. Usually this ends in a segmentation fault. But if I try again, it usually works after the second or third attempt. Has anyone noticed some similar behaviour? I haven't played the games for long - just enough so that I know sound and input works - so I can't comment on the overall stability.

Now I'd like to ask on some game specific things:

Fallout 1 & 2: I have installed the Fallout Fixt mod for Fallout 1 and the Restoration Project for Fallout 2 to be able to play in fullscreen. That seems to work, but there are some color errors in some still images and the FMVs. They go away if I select DirectX 7 in the Fallout configs, but then gameplay is sluggish. Do I need to Install any Direct X runtimes, or is that all included in Wine?
Diablo 2: I have Patch 1.12 with the resolution mod installed. That seems to work pretty well out ouf the box.
Dungeon Keeper 2 is very picky. My GOG verion has some patched exe for better (?) DirectX support, but so far, I had not much luck starting it. The one time I did, the graphis where somewhat corrupted. Maybe I have to play around the different Windows versions?
Privateer 2 with an enhancement fan patch . The game starts, but I have no joystick support. I haven't looked into that so far. Do I need any drivers maybe?

That's it so far from my side. Thanks for hearing me!

Troopaking

@ecto
Hello for directx issues I have found best is to get a old install exe of desired directx and install in wine desktop.

For controller issues I use qjoypad and xdotool that me and Russellb use .

shavecat

Hey all im trying to get hunter hunted , but with no luck . one of my favorite~~strikethrough text~~ games

@ecto
Dungeon Keeper 2
it did run for me , but its really SLOW with the main menu start, even the mouse really leg to move... :
Diablo 2
dosent really work right for me , only if i skip the movies in the start if not it get stuck ,
and when i pick my character it go nuts a bit...

George

@roslof said in Box86 and Wine on RPi4:

I noticed the mesa folder generated from the script is almost 2GB in size. The lion's share in:
/opt/retropie/supplementary/mesa/lib/dri/

You probably want to check the installation. All the files in that directory are supposed to be hard links to a single file, so they should not take any more space than a single 87mb file. If you were to copy them from one installation to another, or even FTP them from somewhere, that might turn those hard links into individual files.

- George

Troopaking

@george
Hello so I'm trying to assist someone in install and having issues .
Most where sd card issues . Fixed them .
Now we are having issue where github asking for username and password

George

@troopaking said in Box86 and Wine on RPi4:

Now we are having issue where github asking for username and password

That's odd. Is that when trying to clone my repo? Perhaps there's a typo? I just checked and it still looks like a public repo.

I just helped someone on the Box86 Discord server get MUGEN running, using your instructions. Nice!

I've been testing out some MUGEN games also. Things seem to work fine, but the sound is choppy with high latency. Have you experienced that?

- George

ecto

After spending a considerable amount of time, I wanted to share some insights I gathered for running games with box86/wine:

Almost all games I tried are copied over directories from my windows pc, where I installed the (GOG) games in a first step.

Fallout 1 & 2 were the most finicky games of the lot. I installed the Restauration Project for FO2 and Fallout et tu for Fallout 1 as mods. On the Pi, the launch of wine needed WINEDLLOVERRIDE=ddraw.dll=n to activate the mod. I also had to change some settings in f2_res.ini for the screen layout, in ddraw.ini the setting singleCore=0 and OverrideArtCacheSize=0and in fallout2.cfgI changed art_cache_size=100. With these settings, Fallout 1 and 2 started and ran nicely in 1920x1080 fullscreen.
Pro Pinball Series these are quite interesting. At first it looked like that they ran right out of the box, (except for Timeshock!, more to that later). But as I played (in 1280x1024 no less!) the ball movement was erratic, especially around the area of the flippers... So a hunch told me to try the setting BOX86_DYNAREC=0 in the start script. And alas! the ball moved as expected. Although everything was a lot slower, it worked and looked nice. Maybe some graphic settings need to be lowered, but it seems that this is the ultimate way to play Pro Pinball on the pi4 (I tried them all!). Timeshock! needs some more love, as there is a dll that needs to be inofficially updated so that the (cd) audio track can be heard (the GOG forums are of help here). Otherwise it's perfectly playable without the music.
Dungeon Keeper 2 this one is also quite interesting. If you want to use DX9, you need to run the (GOG-patched) DKII-DX.EXE. But the menu is vvveeeerrrryyyy slow. The registry of wine ($WINEPREFIX/user.reg) has to be edited (probably easier from within wine --> regedit) and a key value has to be entered: HKCU/Software/Wine/Direct3D/csmt=0. See here, and here. With that Dungeon Keeper is at least startable. I don't know, but I think CSMT should be enabled for all the other games, so maybe the value has to be changed dynamically when starting Dungeon Keeper? Then there is another problem: When you start your dungeon, the creatures behave erratic, and BOX86_DYNAREC=0has to be set again for normal play, which then is a lot slower...
Shivers 2 works well, but I think the WINDOWS.RESfile has to be edited with the patch to the game dir.
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver 2 does not want to start, there seems to be an unknown Opcode...
Sanitarium is a nice point and click adventure, but so far I have not gotten it to work. There is an Error (MapViewOfFile for file 'RES.104' failed ErrorCode=8 , but the game works on my Windows pc without that file, so idk. In some forum there is talk about that, but their solution is a specific version of wine... I have to get this one to work!! ;) EDIT I got Sanitarium to work, by replacing the three files RES.104, RES.204 and RES.304 from the install CDs. The GOG versions of those files are quite a lot larger, so I don't know, why they did with them and what other problems might arise by replacing them...

So all in all everything is quite good. I wish I hade more space on my SD Card ;)

I'm thinking about making a Issue on Github for Box86 concerning the dynarec and the missing opcode, but I'd like to wait for your input first...

Troopaking

@george I copied from your post in this forum directly. I feel the main issue might be hes ssh in the pi not on it.
Was gonna use the github but it doesn't have the emu at the end.
I'm trying on fresh retropie right now . Worked fine.
He was asked for username etc. Made a github entered it said error couldn't resolve host .

Also a few other things I've encountered/figured out.

-I would open pixel desktop download scripts. Then in terminal run emulationstation, then retropie-setup.
The reason is I don't get the mono and gecko installer pop up unless on desktop

-I always use .sh not .conf with mugens .
With mugen I've been able to shorten .ah a lot . I haven't tested with harder games . Works with mugen, skifree, and spooky castle .
I also use it that way all mugens can use qjoypad layout mugen .
With other games I use conf with Russells wine desktop in my github . With his changes it auto looks for a qjoyoad layout with same name as game folder .

Heres my .sh for "mugen1"
#!/bin/bash
cd "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mugen/games/mugen1/"
qjoyoad "mugen" &
WINDEBUG...........

Troopaking

@ecto
Thanks for all that insight and work .

I have found any game that you have to install . I woukd do what you said, install on pc then transfer the game files and folders over .
Unfortunately I don't have a windows pc lol.

So I have to install in wine and works fine to a extent . Worked for baldurs gate, battlefront 2, and half life.
I'd say itd depend on what yourgame needs to run . Battlefront for example setup up directx and something else when installing it .

George

@ecto said in Box86 and Wine on RPi4:

I'm thinking about making a Issue on Github for Box86 concerning the dynarec and the missing opcode, but I'd like to wait for your input first...

If you haven't already, edit the scriptmodule for Box86 so that it pulls from master instead of a tag. The issue with an unknown OpCode may have already been resolved. If you join the Box86 Discord, there is a ton of activity every day. People will post up an unkown OpCode and ptitSeb will just add it later in the day. It's pretty cool!

For the issue on Sanitarium, maybe try to rename the RES.104 file to all caps or all lowercase. See if that helps.

Also, if you need different settings for different applications, you may be better off creating completely new Wine Prefixes for each. That way all the required settings you have will be contained with the game they are related to.

Cool progress and thanks for all the notes!

- George

Troopaking

So I resolved issues of most recent install.
Honestly no clue how though.
Must have been ssh and sd card issue . He changed those and also opening everything in pixel made the difference .

George

@troopaking That's strange. Glad he got it working though!

- George

George

@shavecat said in Box86 and Wine on RPi4:

Hey all im trying to get hunter hunted , but with no luck .

I've been trying to make my way down the list of games people are working on and I took a look at Hunter Hunted. I have a feeling that it's not going to work for the time being. Even though it seems to be for Windows 95/98, it looks like it's still using some 16 bit instructions. It doesn't look like Box86 is compatible with it yet. Hopefully 16-bit compatibility will be on the near horizon. But even on my Windows XP Virtual Machine it acted a little funky.

- George

shavecat

@george
That's really a shame to hear :\ , cause its working on my laptop (windows 10).
Thanks hope it will get a fix or so soon :)

ecto

I got some other great games to run:

Warblade is an Amiga Deluxe Galaga reimagination by the same developer (who sadly passed away). Although the game is just a Galaga clone, there is much do do and discover (secrets!!). I bought the game probably 15 years ago, so I don't know if the shop page still works, but it looks like it. The game works out of the box (you have to change some settings ingame, like fullscreen and D3D support). I have the feeling that that game runs a bit different (faster rate of fire), I have to confirm this on native Windows...
MDK which I had installed on Dosbox runs so much faster, it's a bit scary! (Of course since Dosbox has to work with software rendering.) I can't remember, but I think the GOG version works right out of the box.

Many hours went into The Sims (doesn't work because of some 16-bit code?) and The Sims 2 (Doesn't work because I can't (so far) get a NoCD Version, and I certainly won't connect a CDRom drive to the pi...

What I will try next is Ultima IX Ascention. It's supposed to work well in wine. Not that this is the height of Ultima gaming but me being a completionist...
Also I'm wondering about some "Old School Shooters" like Unreal, Kingpin (somewhat bad game that has a spot in my heart), Undying, XIII or Deus Ex.

Damn it! I need a 1Tb Card ;) EDIT Argh... too expensive ;)

Folly

@ecto said in Box86 and Wine on RPi4:

Damn it! I need a 1Tb Card ;) EDIT Argh... too expensive ;)

Just use an old fashioned hard-drive on your usb. :-)