Hi everyone,

I got myself a Raspberry Pi 400 as my little DOS game station. I've downloaded some games from GOG to it and installed DOSBox but couldn't get any to run. When I start DOSBox and try to start the downloaded .exe from GOG, I get an error message (I can't remember it.) Also tried it with WINE which gives me a "win32 application" error message or similar.

I'm a complete noob with the Raspi, DOSBox and Wine. Would appreciate any help I could get.

Thanks in advance

Look into ProtonDB. It was designed by Valve for game compatibility in Linux. There is another package that I know people use, but the name is slipping my mind at the moment. I will try to find it and post here again.

The other package is called Lutris. I don't know how well these would run on a Raspberry Pi. But I know between these two packages, you should be able to get a very large number of games working on Linux.

Thanks dude! I'll try it out as soon as I'm home and tell you if I got it running!

The executable files that you download from gog.com are Windows installers, not DOS executables, and therefore won't run on a Raspberry Pi (even with WINE due to the ISA difference, unless you use something like box86). Therefore, you need to find a way to extract the game without running the Windows executable.

So, there are a few things you can try, in the order I would attempt them:
* If GOG offers a Linux version, download that version and run the installer. I believe GOG's Linux installers are just shell scripts with binary data attached, and don't contain any machine instructions, so the installer may actually run on the Pi. (You'll still need to provide your own dosbox binary to actually run the game, of course.)
* Use innoextract to extract the files from the Windows installer. (Again, you'll need your own dosbox.)
* Run the installer under wine under box86 (or qemu-i386). Those won't work without some CPU emulation, as the games still run x86 code (again, unless you're running an emulator like box86).

You can try with Dosbox pure, it has binary for Arm processors (used by Raspberry):
https://github.com/schellingb/dosbox-pure

This

Or you could just install dosbox from the repository (Raspberry Pi OS includes this).

That doesn't solve the problem of actually getting the game files, however.

innoextract should work. My point is that you need to do something like that before you have an executable you can run with dosbox.

(Note that innoextract is also in the repository, and it's better to install from the repository if you can, and allow the package manager to handle it.)

This thread leads to a question... Whether GOG might want to offer versions of the downloadables that are friendlier to Raspberry Pi and maybe to Android devices, for some games at least (those that use Dosbox)

Even if those versions were labelled beta, experimental or whatever, and without official support from GOG, just they existing would potentially be an awesome bonus.

Uhhhh, doesn't that require Linux running on an x86 architecture? The Raspberry Pi is ARM based.

EDIT: I see others have already covered this in more detail than me. I'll leave them to it.

innoextract doesn't want to extract the files, unfortunately.

innoextract setup_dark_sun_shattered_lands_1.1_cs_\(28043\).exe
Warning: Unexpected setup data version: 5.6.2 (unicode)
Warning: Unexpected Auto Boolean value: 19
Warning: Unexpected Auto Boolean value: 20
Warning: Unexpected trailing byte in UTF-16 string.
Warning: Unexpected data while converting from UTF-16LE to UTF-8.
Warning: Unexpected trailing byte in UTF-16 string.
Warning: Unexpected data while converting from UTF-16LE to UTF-8.
Warning: Unexpected data while converting from UTF-16LE to UTF-8.
Stream error while parsing setup headers!
├─ detected setup version: 5.6.2 (unicode)
└─ error reason: basic_ios::clear: iostream error

is the errormessage.

Would advise you to look at RetroPi. It's probably not really what you want, but it does allow for DOS games IIRC.

Would you be able to install/extract on another Windows machine, or Linux machine with Wine, and copy the resulting directory to the Raspberry PI? Not convenient of course but it's just the initial step.

Oh good idea, I'll try that,

Would be nice if I could download the games in zip form from GOG.