Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

Run 1992’s hottest games on the Raspberry Pi with the rpix86 emulator

rpix86 emulates cutting-edge hardware like a 486 CPU and Sound Blaster 2.0.

Your Raspberry Pi is great, but it needs more DOS.

For the one million of you who have purchased a Raspberry Pi system since it launched a year ago, has another thing you can add to the list of things it does: programmer Patrick Aalto has put together an emulator, called rpix86, that can run code written for Intel processors.

The Pi's ARM CPU runs at 700MHz, but an emulated x86 processor isn't going to be nearly that fast: specifically, rpix86 emulates an Intel 80486 running at roughly 20Mhz with 640KB of real memory, 4MB of expanded memory, and 16MB of extended memory; Super VGA graphics supporting up to a 640×480 resolution and 256 colors; a SoundBlaster 2.0 sound card; and keyboard and two-button mouse support.

The emulator is intended primarily as a vehicle to run old DOS games that no longer run on modern PCs (at least without the aid of a separate emulator like DOSBox or Boxer), and it has a few limitations that keep it from performing more complex tasks. It supports some protected mode features but lacks support for virtual memory necessary to run versions of Windows newer than 3.0—virtual memory support would "seriously slow down the emulation, which is pretty slow even as it is." Like a real MS-DOS PC, rpix86 also lacks support for long filenames (the traditional 8.3 file naming scheme applies). Aalto has made a number of game-specific fixes since the emulator's first version, but don't expect it to run much more than (relatively) simply DOS games and applications.

Aalto's next project is "ax86," a version of his x86 emulator for Android. It will include optimizations for Android devices' newer ARMv7-capable processors, but otherwise shares a substantial amount of code with rpix86, leaving the door open for further enhancements to the Pi version. Aalto is also responsible for DSx86, which can emulate a 286 or 386 processor on a Nintendo DS.

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