[Help] RetroPie Virtual Emulation with QEMU

netty

Up!! I need really help with that!!

Wyrrrd

Hi netty,

I am currently trying the same. Did you have any success?

If yes, please share your insights.

If not, you can add 'pause' to your batch script (in a new line) and look at a wonderful error message.
Which I tried googling until my fingers fell off. No results.

Faithfully,
Wyrrrd

backstander

I've also tried this in the past without much luck but today I had a couple free hours so I just decided to try this again.

This time I took the easy way out and got QEMU, Linux (ARM) Kernel and Raspbian already packaged together, Raspberry Pi emulation for Windows, and downloaded this file here!

I extracted the contents of that zip file somewhere I could find it easily. Then I ran cmd.exe and navigated to the qemu\qemu directory and ran qemu-img.exe resize 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.img +15G to give me just over a 16GB image to work with.

Next I edited the qemu\qemu\run.bat file and changed -m 192 to -m 256 to give me a little more memory (I think 256MB is the max that works for some reason) and then just double clicked that same run.bat file to start the emulator booting.

After it loads up for the first time you are greeted with Raspi-config. You can change the keyboard layout, locale, timezone and default password for pi user if you want but we have to make one more change before we can expand the root partition to fill up the full 16GB image. If you live in the US, make sure to set the keyboard layout to US first (Generic 105-key (Intl) PC, Other, English (US), English (US), Right Alt (AltGr), No compose key, Yes). Once your done then pick Finish.

Now make a new file named 90-qemu.rules with the information below:

sudo nano /etc/udev/rules.d/90-qemu.rules

KERNEL=="sda", SYMLINK+="mmcblk0"
KERNEL=="sda?", SYMLINK+="mmcblk0p%n"
KERNEL=="sda2", SYMLINK+="root"

Next, reboot and login again then run sudo raspi-config and select expand_rootfs "Expand root partition to fill SD card" and then reboot again to expand the image to the full 16GB.

Then I followed this tutorial to Manual install RetroPie in Raspbian:
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/manual-installation

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install -y git dialog
cd
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup.git
cd RetroPie-Setup
chmod +x retropie_setup.sh
sudo ./retropie_setup.sh

But this is where I get an error because the script does a uname --machine but isn't satisfied by the answer.

Unknown platform - please manually set the __platform variable to one of the following: armv7-mali generic-x11 imx6 odroid-c1 rpi1 rpi2 rpi3 rpi3-64 x86

I'm wondering if there's a way to tell QEMU to use one of these platforms to satisfy the RetroPie-Setup script.

BuZz

just manually set the platform sudo __platform=whatever ./retropie-setup.sh

note retropie-setup works with qemu, but things like ES will not.

Zigurana

@BuZz : why not, too slow?
I was hoping I could use QEMU for ES dev...

BuZz

@Zigurana the RPI gpu hardware is not emulated. You could do es dev in windows or Linux on virtual box.

Zigurana

@BuZz thanks for the suggestion, I'll have a look at it.

BuZz

@padremayi the fact you can run x11 doesn't mean the GPU is emulated.

BuZz

@padremayi i doubt it. you can run RetroPie on virtual box emulating x86 though.

BuZz

@padremayi which program? You can compile and run es on Linux / windows for example. You can cross compile for RPI or using qemu, even if you cant run all software.

BuZz

@padremayi RetroPie is not an os. The premade image is raspbian. Python will work fine on qemu.

BuZz

@padremayi no. RetroPie images for the RPI and raspbian use the same kernels. The raspbian image is just more up to date.

The kernel wont affect a python program.

BuZz

@padremayi Because the RPI hardware is not all emulated.