The "which games works" with Box86/Wine topic on the RetroPie RPI4/400

tiagop

@ecto Glad to hear it ! :)
I have the same issue on the main menu too, it sometimes does that and others doesn't. Since we can play it's fine :D

DrOffensive

Hi everybody.
I'm (somewhat) new to the whole Raspberry/RetroPie stuff.
I've used Linux a lot but am mainly a Windows guy, also why this project interests me very much.
I'm having a few issues with the guide to install wine in retropie, I suspect it's due to old repository references, but good stuff first.

I'm happy to announce that I got Return To Castle Wolfenstein to run through wine, like butter on a hot summers day, on my stock Raspberry Pi4 even in 1080p :D
Max Payne 1 also run alright, though for some reason animations are broken leading to weird t-pose actions and flying guns.
I haven't had success with No One Lives Forever yet, but it being my absolute favourite game, im not given up so easily.
Looking forward to test out more classics like Rainbow Six and AvP2 (though my hopes for those two in particular are very low as they are hard to even run on real hardware)

Regarding my install issues, I ended up doing a hack of sorts to make things work in the end.
I followed the guide in this thread to get the repositories for mesa, box86 and wine. All 3 installed, but box86 complained about not being able to find a doc file and therefore didn't install correctly.
But even with the 3 wine wont run. (This is from a fresh install of retropie)
Through SSH i then followed other guides to install wine on new installs of retropie. All of them for 'bullseye' while i'm running 'buster', all of them giving the same results.
I had 100% confirmed that box86 was correctly installed by running a native x86 Debian binary so that lead to wine being the issue.
In the end I went with wine 6.0-stable, as that was reported most often to be working, and went through every possible depency library.
I don't know which one eventually fixed it, but I think it might have been libglib2.
After getting it to run on the desktop i was finally able to install wine through Retropie-Setup too and make it run from Retropie, but I can't make links to my .exe games. (I know this makes a weird double install).
.conf files are just not recognized and .sh files fails to start the display.
Everything works fine if I run the games either by running them through the RetroPie port wine Explorer or just running them on the desktop with 'wine game.exe'.
Only thing is that wine complains that it can't start RpcSs service but it doesn't seem to affect the games.

Sorry for the long post :P
TL;DR: Return to Castle Wolfenstein works and Max Payne 1 runs but animations are broken.
this project is great. Wine both works for me and it doesn't. :D

retropi19

@tiagop great games

How do you launch direct 3d games??
Did you use the -opengl switch or anything else?

Is there a way to install DirectX??

Thanks

ecto

@retropi19 Direct3D is part of wine and the games should work out of the box. You'll get a much better performance, if the game has a OpenGL rendering backend. So you have to look in the game settings if you can change it from DX to GL.
Have a look at PCGW. Here, you can find lots of infos about all (?) games: which patches are needed (usually none for GOG games) and which rendering backend the game uses and so on.

Most games require DX. Wine's support for DX 9.0c is the best. Other DirectX versions might not work too well.

Usually with a bit of tinkering you can get almost any game to work, the "older" the better. I've had luck with games up to the year 2002. But sometimes you need to install original DLLs using Winetricks, or use different Wine versions (I'm mainly using 7.0) but this is another story...

fryguy1

Has anyone else tried Super Smash Land? I'm been able to get as far as the "Vs" screen before the fight with Wine on an RP4 with 8GB ram, but it always freezes before loading any actual gameplay. I've tried the -no3d and -doublebuffer parameters but no luck. Are there other tweaks that I should try?

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ChaosEffect

Hi, everyone.

I just noticed this topic (I think. I did a quick search and didn't see any posts by me 😅).

I tried tinkering with Wine/Box86 on my Raspberry Pi 4B over the summer, had a lot of trouble with it, and set it aside until now.

Back then, I was able to run the elusive Windows-only Sega Model 2 emulator but had major stability issues. I am curious if anyone else has attempted to run that emulator.

I don't have high hopes for great performance, but that emulator is well known for having good performance on weak hardware.

Aside from the odd game here and there in MAME, Model 2 emulation is limited to this specific emulator, which is closed source and also no longer developed.

ecto

@ChaosEffect Haha, actually Model 2 Emulator was the reason for me to look into box86 and wine.
Eventually I got it working but I had to use an older version (like 0.8 or something). That might have changed, as box86 has matured a lot since then.
BUT don't hope for anything remotely playable. I can only comment on "The House of the Dead" which I tried to play but its a slideshow with maybe 5fps. Maybe other games run better, but as the developer of box86 has put it: M2Em does a lot of funky stuff with DirectX.
So It's probably more of a wonder that it works at all.

Sadly, Model 2 Emulation is (and probably will always be) not a thing for the RPi4. :(

ChaosEffect

@ecto Thanks.

Rail Chase 2 was the only one I was able to actually launch in that emulator. Like your experience with HotD, the performance was pretty bad.

Rail Chase 2 is at least working in MAME, so perhaps the next pi iteration will give us something to work with in lr-mame there.

You may want to try out the Windows version of The House of the Dead or Virtua Cop. A friend had some luck running one of those but had stability issues. I wasn't able to get either to run.

ecto

@ChaosEffect Yes I have the Windows version of House of the Dead working in Wine. Try running it in a virtual desktop with the resolution of the game (640x480 I think).
Something like
wine explorer /desktop=shell,640x480 hotd.exe (I can't remember exactly from the top of my head, but I can have a look when I'm home and you're interested.)

The Windows version sadly isn't looking too hot, but still, better than nothing. I wish I could get it to work with the Sinden lightgun, but I don't know how to create the needed white borders.

I didn't know that there is a Virtua Cop release for windows. I'll go searching tonight...

DolphinCube

@hooperre said in The "which games works" with Box86/Wine topic on the RetroPie RPI4/400:

Sonic Mania (Epic?): Tries to launch. Doesn't.

Oh. Sonic Mania wont run on the Pi normally. But you can use the Decompilation of the engine to make it run. Works just fine on a Pi 4! Does require the Data.rsdk file out of the official game.

mth75

The Black Mirror ... works. ![

IMG_1838.jpg]

windg

Black mirror is amazing adventure !

retropi19

@windg said in The "which games works" with Box86/Wine topic on the RetroPie RPI4/400:

Black mirror is amazing adventure !

Hello there im trying to make age of mythology to work correct
the game actually works and plays fine,but the main menu is unreadable and nothing is visible on it it looks like a font issue that is not only in the menu but also in the in-game dialogs,anyone encountered this issue and fix it???

shavecat

Got -
Freedom Force
Warcraft 3
Elma
IcyTower
Neighbours From Hell1-2
Starcraft
working
still cant believe the are working right ....

mth75

@shavecat Indeed ... it does!

shavecat

@mth75
YES ! ;)

mth75

The party games Atomic Bomberman and Worms Armageddon both work perfectly.

hooperre

@mth75 said in The "which games works" with Box86/Wine topic on the RetroPie RPI4/400:

Is that Worms version the same as the Dreamcast version? With the state of Windows CE games pretty poor on emulators, I'd be interested to play that, but I remember the XBox 360 version being too different for me to feel it was the same.

mth75

@hooperre Version 3.8.1 I believe? I'm not familiar with the DC version.

shavecat

Any luck maybe with
heroes of might and magic 3 ? anyone?
still getting freeze every time after playing a few min':(