Suggestions for ports
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Just to weigh in a bit on the Windows 95 comments here, about a year ago I tried to get it working under DosBox, after noting that (in my opinion) the performance of Windows 3.1 was passable and you could automate things ok with a joystick and menu interface of RetroPie --- save a few rough edges that seem to be fixable at some point (see: WinExit.exe).
What I found then is that although I could get things stable on DosBox on my Windows PC, I could not get it stable (constant OS driver crashes) under RetroPie, so I figured that the driver support between the platforms was not seamless. I had tried a few different versions of both Windows 95 (A, B, C) and Windows 98 (FE, SE).
Also as noted, there's a lot of limitations running Windows 95 under DosBox, including video card support and RAM. Also, there are some quirks mounting CD ISOs after mounting HDD images, which are required for running under DosBox. But there's a DosBox variant/fork here that seems to have decent momentum that at least one person reported being able to compile on a Raspberry Pi, so I figured that one of these days I would want to try to give it a spin and at least check to see what kind of performance we're talking. These builds seem to have solved a good number of these limitations from what I can see. Also has some native support for translating mouse input to a joystick, which would be way useful.
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=52414
IMHO, RetroPie makes the ultimate device, between media playback, retrogaming, and high portability of both. It can run anything up to about 1994 fairly well, and you can get most titles starting at around Windows Vista working reasonably well with some shaking on Windows 10 and using NVidia or Valve streaming. But there's that middle area in between not so much--- optimally I'd love to see some titles like the original half-life build, Max Payne, Worms, and some stuff like that working natively (not streaming). If I had a choice and the performance between the two were comparable, I'd go for Windows 98 over Windows 95 to get the maximum amount of game compatibility bleeding into Windows XP territory.
You're most likely right that any direct port will be much more performant, but I think some of these might be playable.
Anyway, just my past observations.
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@ParadoxGBB Yes I also recently noticed that someone has improved DosBox emulation and made an enhanced version out of it. It might be possible to compile and add the changes to the original DosBox in RetroPie's scriptmodule, or it could be included as an alternative installation. However it might need some testing and improvement of the code in DosBox before being released officially.
I too would like to see many more PC games working on a Raspberry Pi as you do. I could mention quite a few games that I would like to see running. Running Windows 98 would probably be better than Windows 95 since it improves game compatibility. At the moment our best bet is to use open source ports that has compatibility for ARM architecture and the Raspberry Pi it self.
I would say that the existing open source ports that is out there which uses SDL with Linux probably has the highest succes rate in compiling and getting them to work on a Raspberry Pi. This is as far as my experience goes. I know that you could run into other issues trying to get a specific game to work that also need to use other important dependencies such as OpenGL. The most advanced game I have gotten to run was Alien versus Predator and that game was from 1999. It worked but the gameplay was too slow to be played. The best I have done is Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Hexen 2.
From what I have noticed in the past year is that more ports of PC games was showing up as working on the Raspberry Pi. Shadow Warrior, Jagged Alliance 2, Diablo 2 and Half Life.
Thank you for your insight on this.
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@tpo1990, I forgot to mention thanks a ton for your work with the ports --- I grabbed RTCW and it's always awesome to see how far you can push software scenarios on the hardware --- even if not playable, 1999 is pretty impressive on a $35 device.
I actually prefer running games under DosBox because of the additional control it provides (lr-dosbox allows pretty solid joystick mapping without configuring each one piecemeal) and it allows a near-perfect port of my entire library. Plus, it's a nice little parlor trick when I have people over or travel with it to boot into Windows 3.1, and that'd only be more awesome if I could get full Windows 95/98 on there too. But I'm a more "let's see what runs" kind of guy and as much as an OS collector as a retro game one as opposed to really expecting to play every one of these things to completion, so I get that I'm probably not your typical RRPi user.
That said, if anyone locates a compiled copy of DosBox ECE (or finds another reasonable way to do it) on RPi I'd gladly help test. At the moment it seems that DosBox is kind of slowly doing their own thing preparing for their 0.75 release, and there's been many splinters and varients that are undermining the validity of the root project. I haven't seen any real commitment or statement indicating that any of the ECE work is going to make it to an official release... I believe there are concerns that any of these variants compromise on compatibility they've fought hard to build up.
(Thanks for allowing me to crash this thread a bit)
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No problem. Your gratitude is appreciated. It seems as tough 1999 is mostly the limit of PC game ports to be running on a $35 device such as a Raspberry Pi, however that may change with future builds and compatibility with the Raspberry Pi 4.
Ah yes DosBox. A great emulator that needs some configuring to get it up and running as best it can to each owns setup. Even Windows 3.1 is nice to emulate though it mostly would be only for preview rather than normal usage. It would be cool to get a full Windows 95/98 desktop running. Me too. I have probably spent way more configuring and testing to see what works and what doesn't in the past year than playing the games.
Maybe the creator of the original work of DosBox for RetroPie can help out with that, otherwise it will probably need someone else with the knowhow to make it happen.
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tpo1990 is it possible to create portable bosbox games for retropie eg:a game with dosbox in the same folder run dosbox and play directly the game eg: like the game beneath a steel sky that can be installed directly with apt install and include dosbox and when you run the game its loads it thought dosbox directly
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@retropi19 I'm not sure why you would want to do that on a RetroPie system, but I think I have seen something about creating script files that you can use with DosBox to be able to run certain files that are located in a folder. I cannot remember where I saw that.
However you could possibly just place the DosBox contents in a subfolder placed in the specific Dos game that you want. I know that GOG.com does that when you install older PC games that are used with DosBox.
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If you specifically want to play Beneath A Steel Sky, it will autoload on Amiberry with the appropriate WHDload image.
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@VictimRLSH said in Suggestions for ports:
If you specifically want to play Beneath A Steel Sky, it will autoload on Amiberry with the appropriate WHDload image.
Or ScummVM if they really want the PC version.
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@tpo1990 there is ported version of blood that uses the eduke32 engine already included in retropie, but i cannot figure out how to build or to run can you take a look?
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@retropi19 Ïnteresting. Could be something to look up on further to see if it works or not. Maybe I will. Others here that know how to build from source are free to try it out as well.
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@tpo1990 this engine plays Blood/Redneck Rampage/and Exhumed if you can make a port for all this three will be amazing
also the diablo port plays you can make a script if you want
https://github.com/diasurgical/devilutionX
and the shadow warrior game port here
Rpi3B+ USB 2.0 Boot HDD Hitachi 40GB 5400rpm
Rpi4 4GB rev1.4 USB 3.0 Boot HDD Hitachi 160GB 7200rpm
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@retropi19 JFSw does work, but you have to have it in window mode due to the frame rate being crap, it runs really slow if you dont have it in window mode
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@retropi19 Yes there are probably more ports to make into scripts for RetroPie that will require a lot of work.
@ExarKunIv I agree that it is too slow. JFSw is probably not ready for RetroPie and if it is, then it might require optimizing the configuration to be able to run at a respectable framerate.
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if it run thought runcommand with matchbox maybe it performs better
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Has anyone tried to get VCMI (heroes of might and magic 3 engine) running on raspberry pi? I thought I might give it a shot but won't bother if someone has already tried. I have hmm2 running through dosbox but hmm3 was windows only.
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It would work, there is an android build. I think the prerequisite libraries are all available.
https://wiki.vcmi.eu/How_to_build_VCMI_(Linux)#Prerequisites
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@Efriim Yea it look like it should work on linux as well. Doesnt look like its fully feature complete though which is a shame.
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So I'm trying to get VCMI installed. The installation instructions say that VCMI is part of the raspbian contrib repository but when I sudo apt-get install vcmi it says it can't locate the package. http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/pool/contrib/v/ if you click on the link you can see vcmi is there so I'm not sure what the issue is.
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@quicksilver The web folder contains just the source package, there's no binary to install.
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@mitu so if I understand correctly I can remove the # from the deb-src line in the sources.list to get source packages?
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