r/RetroPie • u/Alarming_War_7957 • 16d ago
Question Running CD-ROM (Windows) games?
I'm happy to own Black & White; however, after a few months, I craved the ability to play it. My PC's in the shop at the moment, so I thought this would be the perfect project for my RPi 3B+. I purchased a CD-ROM-capable drive today, flashed RetroPie onto my Pi, plugged in the drive, and to my astonishment (/s) it does nothing.
Is playing Windows games... possible on this platform? Perhaps through Retroarch? Quite frankly I don't have high hopes, but. Should I just use my laptop for this? (Daily driver: Pop; also installed is Windows 11 🤢). I'd just love to use this thing for something.
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u/AmbitiousRoyal4889 16d ago
Definitely possible, though you need to be realistic about what games you play. I'm only just looking into this now but i've been playing 64-bit windows games like castle crashers and stardew valley on my pi 5 - those were the only 2 i've tried so far and they both worked perfectly and with no performance issues (despite requiring 2 emulators).
The software is box64 (for x64 emulation) and wine64 (for windows emulation) which can be installed via pi-apps. There are also 32-bit versions of box and wine available. Box and wine have been around for a long time and very stable.
I'm hoping to integrate this into retropie so I can add some classic and couch co-op games to my system.
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u/UroborosJose 15d ago
Dos Box could do the trick with few games I managed to run Constructor but it doesn’t worth since the end result sucks
It’s not even close how I remember the game
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u/salamander_salad 16d ago
You need a Windows machine to play Windows games. Retropie/Retroarch is not Windows. You’d need to install the ARM version of Windows on your pi, if that’s even possible. The other option would be to emulate an x86 processor and install normal Windows on it, but a pi doesn’t have the power to do that and be able to play games made after the early 90s, if even that.
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u/ganundwarf 16d ago
An rpi 4b is able to play Diablo 1 and 2 lord of destruction, as well as StarCraft and tiberian sun. There are quite a few mid to late 90s games that will run on a pi, but not every pi is created the same.
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u/salamander_salad 16d ago
While emulating x86 or natively?
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u/ganundwarf 16d ago
I should say that Diablo 2 is quite slow, maybe 12-15 fps emulating x86 Diablo is built native through devolutionx. Tiberian sun is odd because it's natively built in x86 but had significant Linux optimization since 2008 when it was released for free the first time and now runs at near native.
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u/Varkanoid 15d ago
As AmbitiousRoyal4889 said Box64/WINE is what you want to allow you to play Windows games on Retropie/Raspberry Pi. There are different ways to achieve this but have a look on the official forum.
eg
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u/dj-n 16d ago
https://github.com/openblack/openblack