Looking for something a bit more from your Raspberry Pi? Tired of the usual console and arcade games? Eltech’s Exagear Desktop is a virtual machine that runs on your Raspberry Pi and allows you to run x86 games. [Dmitry]’s done a write-up about running more modern games on your Raspberry Pi.
Up until now, the Pi has been a great platform for retro gaming. By running MAME or EmulationStation, you can play classic arcade games as well as the great console games you played as a kid. Exagear Desktop goes one further, allowing you to use Wine to play more modern PC games on your Raspberry Pi 3.
The Pi 3 is still a bit underpowered for bleeding edge games, but is powerful enough that it can play some of the PC games from a few years ago. [Dmitry]’s example shows how to get Arcanum, Disciples II, and Fallout running on the Raspberry Pi. In the second part of the write-up, [Dmitry] shows you how to get Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, and Caesar 3 installed and running as well.
Obviously they will always lag behind today’s gaming machines, but the power now available in a computer the size of a credit card is pretty impressive. It’s nice to have a tool that allows one to play more than just the console games from years gone by — this opens up a whole range of great PC games to add to our library. Maybe it’s time to fabricate that new PC game controller. Or, if the Raspberry Pi seems like too much power, you could consider playing retro games on an Arduino.
Dmitry strikes again!
(also FP!)
Just need to make sure you have a competent power supply.
I have a supposed “2.5mA” power supply but I can’t start the thing or play a game with out that damn lightning bolt showing up.
> 2.5mA
Well there’s your problem…
Welllllllllllllll, oops. 2.5A. I’m used to typing mA otherwise.
Short story long, don’t buy a LoveRPi power supply.
I have a LoveRPi power supply on 3 different Pi3s (made a couple for some friends and one for myself) and I have not had any issue seeing the lightening bolt. Even under heavy load from within Kodi or EmulationStation itself, it has been fine. Now I need to go test it out and put it through it’s passes.
On the other hand, I have had issues with RPi stickers having zero adhesive on them.
I wish I had the gumption to buy another power supply from them to see if the one I got in my kit is wonky but I don’t really want to test it, even if it is a cheap venture.
I got the LoveRPi kit last week with their “2.5A” power supply that also gave me undervoltage warnings nonstop for a day. I wake up the next day, the Pi had turned off on its own, and now the Pi doesn’t output to any monitor anymore when I turn it on.
Avoid LoveRPi’s power supplies.
How much did you save compared to the official RPi power supply?
hard to say it was a kit. The CanaKit kits are considerably more expensive (the most comparable kit was/is $20 more [40%]). I’ll be fine if I buy another pi in the near future and get a CanaKit PSU for the pi that is going to be doing more power intensive work.
Pay attention to a cable. It might drop voltage a lot. I’ve bought a tester and only 5 from 7 was ok.
I’ve had a lot better luck with DIY power supplies. Grab a good 12 or 9v power supply and regulate it down to 5.1 or so and use a plenty big 6.3v caps. I had a stable pi running on 6 AA batteries with a camera and wifi on an RC rover set up that way.
That’s how I roll. Grab an old DELL laptop PSU and buck it down.
There’s a solution to all this: don’t use cheap USB power supplies which are designed only to charge phones.
Use a real 5V supply and then wire it to the 5V pins of the GPIO header. Even an inefficient transformer/7805 DIY PSU is better than Chinese “2A” chargers.
(Tip: wire as many pins as you can to get more current through.)
“Real” = mid 90s AT with 40A on 5V :-P
2.5A is plenty. Check the voltage at the board side to see if the cable drops too much. If that’s the case, use a better cable (hint: Anker).
How about a recent version of MS Flight Sim [Dmitry]?
I think it’d be possible if we can connect GTX 1060 to RPi :)
We can also reverse engineer the GTX 1060 and make it run standalone. It should have a fairly decent CPU somewhere, and it should have a decent GPU too. Well, it should *be* a GPU.
I wonder how this would perform on the latest Odroid.
What about undertale?
Impressive tech, but I’m not terribly keen on paying for a VM license to try this out…..
I’m confused, you need to buy a license to use this? If so, I consider this post an ad and do not understand it’s presence on hackaday. Why is that information not included in the article if that is the case?
You also need to buy the RPi…it is not free either…and a monitor. If hackaday restricted itself to articles that didn’t require a purchase of any sort, there wouldn’t be much content.
If you don’t like it… whip out your text editor, get cosy with the WINE and QEMU source code and hack up a solution of your own.
I think the point is to show what is possible to inspire someone to perhaps take on the project.
Given the complexity here, it is no surprise that someone is asking money for their effort.
Well, DosBox supposedly can run up to Windows 98 these days. I wonder how well it can run some of these games on a Raspberry Pi 3?
Operating System Raspbian Jessie from March 2016
Software Eltechs ExaGear Desktop for Raspberry Pi 3 v1.5
1. Put ExaGear Desktop archive with installation packages and [€24.95] ExaGear Desktop license key in the same folder.
And there I stopped reading. Definitely as SkinnyV says this hackaday entry looks more like an eltechs infomercial than a hack, unless I missed the keygen. ;P
@Redhatter (VK4MSL): The issue is that hackaday’s article doesn’t mention anything about having to shell out $25 just to try the software
and makes it look as if such [Dmitry] was a third party instead of the own software selling company and their install instructions.
just putting this out there. I’ve been emailing these peoples and they say there is a trial available for raspberry pi users. just use (sudo apt-get install exagear-desktop) then make sure GL drivers is enabled in config
Does it work on a Pi Zero (W) ? If yes, what can we expect performancewise?