Gaming Beyond Retropie

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.