x86 on Pi - superjamie/lazyweb GitHub Wiki

I do not have Exagear for sale

Update: It's January 2020. I know Eltechs have gone away. I don't have an Exagear license to sell. Please do not email me asking to buy Exagear from me.

tl;dr - September 2016

Try this free Pi 2 Raspbian Wheezy image with x86 Wine preinstalled, it runs about the speed of a 300MHz PC, I don't think it supports Pi 3 as-is but I haven't tried:

Background

Every now and then, someone pops up asking if they can play their favorite PC game on the Raspberry Pi. The answer is usually no, PC games are made for the x86 architecture but the Pi uses ARM architecture and the two are not compatible.

DOSBox and Wine

DOSBox does exist and allows DOS PC games to work on the Raspberry Pi. My own testing has found the Pi 3 performs at roughly the speed of a 486 66MHz.

However, people often do not mean DOS games, they mean Windows games.

Wine can be used to run Windows applications on x86 Linux but it is not a solution here either. Wine literally stands for Wine Is Not an Emulator. Wine is an application call translation layer. The basic idea is that a Windows application says something like "Hey Windows, draw the game window here" and Wine translates that into "Hey Linux Xorg, draw the game window here". The actual application code is still x86 and executes natively, it's only the operating system parts like graphics/sound/input that are translated to Linux.

Aim

One of the most commonly-requested games is Fallout 2, so this page explores possible ways to run 1990s 32-bit Windows games which use little or no 3D such as:

This page is not about later 3D accelerated games like Half-Life (1997) or Unreal Tournament (1999) or Deus Ex (2000) or Fallout 3 or Portal or Crysis or World of Warcraft or Warcraft 3 or Counter-Strike or DotA or Team Fortress or anything like that.

Windows 9x in DOSBox

I've always heard about this but I never really looked into it. A Google search returns these guides:

This would probably work well on a powerful desktop PC, but considering DOSBox performance on Pi 3 is about equal with a 486 66MHz, this probably would not work very well on Raspberry Pi.

ExaGear Desktop

ExaGear Desktop is a software product made by Russian company Eltechs. It claims to be able to run x86 Windows applications on Raspberry Pi ARM. A license costs US$16.45 for Pi Zero and US$27.45 for Pi 2 and Pi 3 (and Pi 3 support is marked as beta).

ExaGear sounds very intriguing, however most peoples' introduction to it is some blog-like post submitted to r/raspberry_pi which ends up actually being an advertisement written by an Eltechs employee. There is at least one Eltechs employee who claims to be the CEO. There may not be greater than one employee. Despite several threads where I've asked ExaGear to upload videos demonstrating some common 90s Windows games running and them saying they would, there have been no such things forthcoming. This sort of deceptive marketing and lack of proof makes me really question whether this product can do what it claims.

There are some things we can learn about ExaGear from the various things said by and around them:

  • The license is tied to a single Pi, it is not transferable
  • There is no trial version
  • There is no refund
  • There is no 3D acceleration
  • Performance seems roughly equal to a 400MHz x86 PC
  • There is an open source repository at https://github.com/Eltechs/wine with exagear branches

The MagPi looked at ExaGear in their Issue 35 from July 2015 on Page 58. This explains much more about the technology, it's using a QEMU emulation layer to run a Debian or Ubuntu container or virtual machine image which can have Wine installed in it. They described that getting x86 Linux working was easy, but getting 32-bit x86 Windows software running was very hard and that "only very old" software could be used. This could be due to the old Wine 1.6.2 version included and lack of Wine compatibility or simply because they expected it to run more modern 3D Windows apps than I would be interested in. Their conclusion is:

In all, we found ExaGear Desktop provided no practical use for Windows software, but was fantastic for running Linux x86 programs.

ODROID Magazine looked into ExaGear for their February 2015 issue. This is even more detailed, saying this is a virtual machine, it can do some software Mesa emulation of basic OpenGL 3D but not much (eg: not enough to even run the Steam client), and talks more about usage and launching it. There is a screenshot of Total Annihilation (Sept 1997, Win95, 100 MHz CPU, 16Mb RAM, PCGW) running on an ODroid U3 which is right on target for the sort of games I'm looking at here.

To be honest I expect ExaGear Desktop on Pi 3 would run all the Win9x games I listed above just fine. I don't know why ExaGear are so evasive about this. If they just put up some good videos showing it running things like Diablo and StarCraft the sales would probably come rolling in. Oh well, that's their silly mistake to make.

There are also ExaGear versions for Android:

There are various YouTube videos demonstrating these working pretty well on fast devices (I guess about 2013 onwards or Tegra 4 onwards) but this page isn't about Android.

Patched QEMU and Wine

Whilst reading these Raspberry Pi Forum threads about all this:

I came across this image of a pre-made Rasbian Wheezy with Wine 1.5.2 and a QEMU 1.4.0 patched to allow running of x86 binaries on ARM:

The QEMU source is up at:

The patches needed to get this working are on the WineHQ forums at:

Performance is apparently about equal with a 300MHz x86 PC. It doesn't seem the creator has applied any of these patches to Raspbian Jessie, and it's not clear if the Pi 2 image supplied works on a Pi 3 (or ever could).

I thought this is what ExaGear does as well, but Vadim from Eltechs read this page and advised that they're not using QEMU, they're using their own emulation.

Future Ideas

  • Try update AlbrechtL's Wheezy image for the Pi 3
  • Try get QEMU with NPTL patch working on Jessie on Pi 3
  • Try get Wine with NPTL and epoll patches working on Jessie on Pi 3
  • Try compile Eltechs' ExaGear Wine 1.8.1 source on Jessie on Pi 3
  • Try use the Raspberry Pi 2 Cortex A7 compile flags from RetroPie:
    -O3 -mcpu=cortex-a7 -mfpu=neon-vfpv4 -mfloat-abi=hard -funsafe-math-optimizations
  • Try use the Raspberry Pi 3 Cortex A53 compile flags from RetroPie:
    -O3 -march=armv8-a+crc -mtune=cortex-a53 -mfpu=neon-fp-armv8 -mfloat-abi=hard -funsafe-math-optimizations

Exagear Review - October 2016

After seeing this page on Reddit, Exagear's CEO Vadim Gimpelson said the above was correct except that they don't use qemu, they use their own x86 emulation layer. He offered me a free Exagear trial key, which is something they'd been doing on Twitter lately as well. I got a license for a Pi 3 and gave it a shot.

Running strings over the binary shows a number of C++ function names which only return Google results relating to Exagear, so the assertion that the emulation is unique appears true. The install is simple, you end up with a desktop icon or the command exagear which launches you into a Debian 8 i686 terminal where you can install Wine or whatever else you want. There also appears to be a hook into /usr/bin/wine in the parent OS so that Wine app icons in the application menu launch in Exagear, which is a nice touch.

Given that Exagear doesn't support 3D acceleration and runs Wine 1.8, I figured I'd try some old pre-3D Windows games. I've also made efforts to distinguish between which were Wine problems and which were Exagear problems by testing the same games on Wine 1.8 in Ubuntu 16.04 on my x86 PC as well. My results were as follows:

Yoda Stories

  • Worked

I had an already-installed set of Yoda Stories files, they fired right up and worked fine.

Indiana Jones' Desktop Adventures

  • Failed - Wine problem

The installer wouldn't run for this, nor would it run on x86 Wine. Given that this game uses the same engine as Yoda Stories, if I had an already-installed set of files I expect this would work.

Decker by Shawn Overcash

  • Failed - Wine problem

Another installer failure, reproduced on Wine x86 as well.

WinRisk

  • Failed - Exagear problem

This one works fine on x86, so I guess Exagear doesn't implement something it needs.

Age of Empires

  • Failed - Exagear problem

AoE installs but fails with a DirectDraw error. This works fine on x86 Wine. Considering this isn't exactly 3D support, I had expected it would work. If DirectDraw doesn't work, that probably rules out any other games I'm interested in too.

Sim City 2000

  • Failed - Wine problem

Another one where the installer wouldn't run. Maybe these are Win16 installers and need the already-installed game files run?

Fallout 2

  • Failed - Exagear problem

The GOG installer runs but brings up some Dot Net error when launching the game. I then couldn't get winetricks to work to install components like Dot Net (though the GOG installer apparently already included them) so no luck here. These games work fine on x86 Wine.

Diablo

  • Failed - Exagear problem

This brings up some graphics error, potentially this is related to DirectDraw support like Age of Empires.

Summary

At this point I gave up. I'd had one success and many failures.

I don't really see the utility of being able to run x86 Linux programs on ARM. Pretty much everything in-repos compiles on ARM anyway. There's no point running an x86 binary of bash or vim or whatever. Some friends have reported success running Netflix in a tiny Chrome window, but that's no good for practical use.

If there is some x86 Linux thing you need to run, at $30 Exagear seems a hard sell. If you need something temporarily then get a free shell or VPS or a low-cost VPS. If you need something permanently, get a low-cost VPS or a $50 netbook with a 1GHz processor and 2Gb RAM.

The idea of running all my favorite Windows games on Raspberry Pi with Exagear seemed too good to be true, and it was.

Exagear doesn't seem worth it for my purposes.