DOS(PC) Emulator for RaspBerry Pi



rpix86 v0.03 released! - Dos(PC) Emulator for RaspBerry Pi Released
via Raspberry Pi News

Homebrew Coder Pate who first off released a DOS Emulator for the Nintendo DS, then moved onto the Android has now posted a release of his DOS Emulator for the Raspberry Pi. For those who don't know a Dos Emulator lets you play old PC Games such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Theme park and similar games from that period, in short an excellent way to play old games on a new device that was never intended to run the game.

The current status of the emulation is as follows:

CPU: 80486 processor, including the protected mode features (for running DOS4GW games) but without virtual memory support. The emulation runs at a speed of around 20MHz 80486 (which equals a 40MHz 80386) machine. Memory: 640KB of low memory, 4MB of EMS memory and 16MB of XMS memory.Super-VGA graphics, with a maximum resolution of 640x480 with 256 colors. SoundBlaster 2.0 (including AdLib-compatible FM sounds) sound card. US keyboard.Two-button mouse.

Here's a couple of screens from the emulator:

First off one of the emulator at StartUP:


Heres a screen showing benchmarks (Notice that the Raspberry Pi even through emulation is much faster at this still early stage)

Heres the news from the latest release:

Okay, yet another version of rpix86 is now available! During the previous week I first debugged some issues with the Logitech K400 wireless mouse/keyboard combo USB device, with the help of a Raspberry Pi forum user Jessie. Big thanks for the help! I noticed that my event file detection and handling routines did not properly handle the situation where the same event file sends both keyboard and mouse events. I made some changes to the routines, in addition to adding the event file number overriding parameters in the previous 0.02 version. After some iterations we managed to get the event system working properly in rpix86. After that I then implemented some other changes and missing features. The complete list of changes is here:

Improved support for combined keyboard/mouse USB devices (for example Logitech K400). Fixed a problem in Mode-X STOSD opcode (fixes "Settlers" black screen). Implemented read from file directly to EGA VRAM ("Heimdall"). Fixed SB command DSP_RESET to stop auto-init DMA play ("Doom").

Next I think it is time for me to work on the ax86 version for a while. You can of course still send me bug reports and enhancement requests for rpix86, especially since over 95% of the code is shared between ax86 and rpix86. If a game misbehaves on one of them, it will almost certainly misbehave also in the other version, so all game-specific enhancements and fixes will affect both emulators.

For more information and downloads, click here!