The Pi uses a completely different architecture to the PC and you can't run MS-DOS/Windows programs on it. (It won't run Linux programs either.)

Errius wrote:

The Pi uses a completely different architecture to the PC and you can't run MS-DOS/Windows programs on it. (It won't run Linux programs either.)

Not quite.

Here's the full story:

The Raspberry Pi is not an emulator, first off. It's just a single board computer.

But the Pi uses the ARM architecture for its CPU, as opposed to PCs which use the x86 architecture. This means that whatever programs you want to run on it must be compiled for ARM. For a great many Linux programs, this is no problem at all, and, in most cases, has already been done so you would never notice the difference.

But DOS games and programs are a whole different animal. You can't just easily compile these for ARM, so you have to run them in an emulator. For this you have two main options: DOSBox and rpix86. Usually for the games you want, one of these will work, albeit rather slowly since it can't "cheat" and use dynamic recompiling to speed up the code by passing raw binary commands through to the CPU, since it's not x86. It helps though if you're using the latest version of the Pi which has a much faster CPU than the older ones. You'll probably get about 386 speeds.

So yes, you can run Windows 95 on it, but forget about high-end graphics emulation. Theoretically it's possible but the code to do that hasn't been written yet.

Yeah, I should have made it clear "It won't run x86 Linux programs either." There are closed-source programs available for x86 Linux (e.g. rar) that aren't available for the Pi.

DOSfan1994 wrote:

So I have several questions about this, is the direct 3d hardware acceleration for the Windows GDI any great depending on what 2D/3D video card it emulates? Can I format hard disk images to FAT32 with use of the WIN98C image? Can it emulate any voodoo 3D accelerator cards for 3D acceleration such as voodoo1, voodoo2 (With SLI), Voodoo3, voodoo4 and voodoo 5?

To be clear: it will not do anything you can't already do substantially better on an ordinary desktop PC (i.e. by using VMware or PCem, if necessary).

Jorpho wrote:

To be clear: it will not do anything you can't already do substantially better on an ordinary desktop PC (i.e. by using VMware or PCem, if necessary).

Except reduce your electricity bill.

An RPi is a great option if it's performance is sufficient, but for this application it likely is not. It can do a decent job on arcade and console titles (see RetroPie) which might be of interest to you. RPi uses very little power as well, so it's very suitable for applications where it's left running continuously.

Is the Arduino any better than Raspberry pi?

The Arduino is completely different from the Raspberry Pi, and will certainly not run any DOS games or other general-purpose software you may be familiar with.

The Arduino does not have the processing power for a proper DOS emulator. It runs at 16Mhz (however with most instructions being 1 cycle it is not that bad) and has about 256Kb flash memory. It is also just an 8bit processor (but can do 16bit and floating point computation). Datasheet

The Pi can apparently natively run old Acorn Archimedes games which is intriguing. Apparently the best version of Elite was the Archimedes release.

This is no help for your DOS games of course.

vladstamate wrote:

The Arduino does not have the processing power for a proper DOS emulator. It runs at 16Mhz (however with most instructions being 1 cycle it is not that bad) and has about 256Kb flash memory. It is also just an 8bit processor (but can do 16bit and floating point computation). Datasheet

Arduino is a product family of development boards and they don't all have the same microcontroller. But you're right that most of them have an 8-bit AVR chip and none of them can run DOS or Windows programs.
https://www.arduino.cc/en/Main/Products
http://www.arduino.org/products/boards

Errius wrote:

The Pi can apparently natively run old Acorn Archimedes games which is intriguing. Apparently the best version of Elite was the Archimedes release.

This is no help for your DOS games of course.

Yes, but only when running a RISC OS distribution.

A Raspberry Pi with Linux can run dosbox, but there is not much power... I ran it on an original Raspberry Pi, and I guess it should run any 8086 or 286 games at full speed. A Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 should run faster, but keep on mind that (although cores are faster) the great power increase come from its multi core processor... but dosbox only runs on one core.

In my testing, DOSBox runs at the level of a 386-20 or 386-25 on an RPi 2.

The benchmarks pi my Raspberry Pi at the same level as a 386SX, but it felt sluggish with games supposed to run fine at that speed. That's the reason to put it at a lower level.

The model 3 is 30% faster than the model 2 and 70% faster than the original Pi.

Has anyone tried the model 3 with DOSBox?

What he's really trying to ask (in an annoyingly intentionally obfuscated way), is "can X run Lego Creator with Direct3D acceleration?".

His references to Windows GDI really stem from my explanation on why no emulator with Voodoo emulation is ever going to work with it.

Errius wrote:

The model 3 is 30% faster than the model 2 and 70% faster than the original Pi.

Has anyone tried the model 3 with DOSBox?

if you overclock the rpi3 a little to say 1400mhz
and you compile dosbox for the rpi3 (enableing dynamic recompilation for arm and etc)

force the resolution to 720x400 and set surface rendering, normal2x scaling and aspect correction off in dosbox (this will give a full screen image pretty close to 4x3 on a 1080p monitor)

doom 1 timedemo 3 is about 35fps (midi selected as the music type, i have plenty of external modules to use over a usb midi adapter)
descent is quite playable (similarly midi selected)
wolf3d is as you would expect some absurd number of fps
tie fighter runs well
theme park runs well

640x480 res games it struggles quite a bit though