What DOS games can it run?

[ShiftPlusOne]

Quote from CaesarRoyale on August 10, 2011, 17:37
if i somehow get my hands on Windows 95/98 with actual DOS, how could that work out?

Well, you can't run it straight on the raspberry pi. You have to go through DOSBox... which will be painfully slow, it seems.

[CaesarRoyale]

Why won't W98/95 work on R-pi, not ARM?

[abishur]

Quote from CaesarRoyale on August 12, 2011, 23:00
Why won't W98/95 work on R-pi, not ARM?

That is correct! Of course, even if you did get an ARM11 windows (windows CE, supposedly Windows 8 with also have an ARM version), there are some proprietary drivers that the R-pi team is not allowed to release that are needed to run the graphics side of the r-pi. Maybe one day they'll release a windows driver for us (or broadcom might? I don't 100% understand all the nuances going on there), we'll have to see how it goes

Edit: We're talking about Windows 95/98 running natively on the R-pi, as has been mentioned above, you could get it to work via dosBox, but it probably wouldn't be pretty!

[jamesh]

The drivers on the linux side will be open source I believe, but there is a binary blob that runs on the GPU (basically the code that make it work!) that would are Broadcom proprietary.

If someone wrote a equivalent set of drivers to the Linux side then I guess MS would be able to get an Arm version of Windows 8 going, but I'm not sure it would be worth their effort. In general the public does not have access to Windows source code, so you wouldn't be able to roll you own version like you can with Linux.

[ShiftPlusOne]

jamesh, are you sure about that?. I think the actual kernel module is closed.

[Pickle]

Sorry to say but the assumption that because quake3 runs daggerfall will run through dosbox is wrong.
Quake3 is running natively on the cpu and is using the gpu, daggerfall is running through an emulator using only cpu. Even with the dynamic C recompiler for ARM it is still too slow for something like daggerfall or even the first elder scrolls.

Edit: sorry missed that there was 3 more pages of comments that clarified the inherit problems with dosbox and speed.
Nice to see the links back to the pandora and my port(recompile) of dosbox

[thebuell]

I'd love to port OOlite to the Raspberry PI. It's a clone of Elite, see http://oolite.org/

[ShiftPlusOne]

The almighty Pickle! =D

I haven't really been following the Pandora too much, but everything I've seen has your name plastered all over it. So yeah, great to see you on here.

[Pickle]

ah thanks, yeah i have been involved with the pandora pretty much from the beginning porting and writing what software I can for it. Maybe that can be the case for the rPi when it reaches production.
What can i say im attracted to small embedded devices

[asb]

Well, here's a sampling that might interest you: ScummVM (playing Beneath a Steel Sky), openttd, and Micropolis.

[prehensile]

Interesting. asb, I'm assuming from the similar usernames that's your video?

Since you said that you just grabbed them from apt with no further tinkering, I'm guessing that ScummVM and OpenTTD are using SDL to draw to X.

Which makes things sound promising for a DOSBox port, since that uses SDL too. However, it'd be dog slow in software mode. Maybe the sensible thing to do would be a port of SDL to RPi which can talk to TEH BLOB. That'd be a handy thing to have for any SDL-backed app.

There may well be other complications involved in porting DOSBox though. I'm assuming it's not very x86-dependent, since there's many ports to other platforms, but I'm no expert, just some bloke gassing on a forum. Sounds like Pickle knows what he's talking about though. Monsieur Pickle?

[tonycollinet]

I'm not sure it has been stated clearly enough. Raspi is an ARM Chip – it uses a different instruction set than x86 (PC) architecure devices.

You cannot run code on it – even with Dosbox or wine – unless it has been compiled for the arm processor – and this can only be done if the source is available.

Even dos box/wine would need to be compiled for arm before they will run. Windows will never be ported to the raspi, because MS does not make the source available and it is unlikely they will port it themselves.

It IS possible that some x86 apps might be runnable on Raspi using Qemu – which emulates different processors, not just different os's – but it would be a non trivial task to get it working.

[Tomo2k]

DOSBox is a full CPU emulation system – it works fine on PowerPC.

So it should be possible to compile for ARM, so I would say yes, you can probably run old DOS games.

The key requirement is SDL, which can be compiled for ARM. Don't know if a binary is available, but that doesn't really matter as it is easy enough to recompile anyway.

As to how well they will run, dunno. DOSBox don't have any benchmarks for ARM, but the 1GHz PPC benchmark implies that it may struggle at 640x480 and you may have to stay on lower resolutions.

WINE is a different matter, because WINE Is Not an Emulator, it's a compatibility shim for API translation and doesn't try to emulate the CPU.

[tonycollinet]

Tomo2k said:


DOSBox is a full CPU emulation system – it works fine on PowerPC.

So it should be possible to compile for ARM, so I would say yes, you can probably run old DOS games.



Sorry - my mistake - looking at the FAQ though, it does suggest that machines slower than 1GHz are going to struggle.

[mightygoose]

liz said:


Now, if someone fancies doing a port of the Baldur"s Gate series, I"ll be all over it.



OMG javing played them on the PS2 i love those games...