Retro

Raspberry Pi 4: Chronicling the Desktop Experience – Emulate Home Computers – Week 15

Last Updated on April 22, 2022

This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.

A glaring omission from my RPI4 blog to date is gaming on this wee machine. There’s so many games to play on the machine, it’s difficult to know where to begin. I’ll start with something that shouldn’t be taxing on the machine. Emulating home computers. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but also ran other types of software.

Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user.

My experience of the packages provided by the Raspbian repositories is somewhat baffling. There’s tons of great free software that’s not included, yet there’s plenty of software included without any optimization. Sometimes this renders what otherwise are useful software completely useless. I’ve gone through the home computer emulators mentioned in this article, summarizing my findings on Page 5 of this blog article.

I cannot feasibly cover all 21 home computer emulators. Instead, I’ve looked at three of the cream: FS-UAE, ZEsaurUX, and Hatari. The former emulates the Amiga A500, A500+, A600, A1200, A1000, A3000 and A4000 models. ZEsaurUX is one of the finest ZX Spectrum emulators. And Hatari is a sublime Atari ST emulator. Let’s start with FS-UAE.

Next page: Page 2 – FS-UAE

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction
Page 2 – FS-UAE
Page 3 – ZEsarUX
Page 4 – Hatari
Page 5 – Survey of Home Emulators on the RPI4


Read all my blog posts about the RPI4.

Raspberry Pi 4 Blog
Week 36Manage your personal collections on the RPI4
Week 35Survey of terminal emulators
Week 34Search the desktop with the latest version of Recoll
Week 33Personal Information Managers on the RPI4
Week 32Keep a diary with the RPI4
Week 31Process complex mathematical functions, plot 2D and 3D graphs with calculators
Week 30Internet radio on this tiny computer. A detailed survey of open source software
Week 29Professionally manage your photo collection with digiKam
Week 28Typeset beautifully with LyX
Week 27Software that teaches young people how to learn basic computing skills and beyond
Week 26Firefox revisited - Raspbian now offers a real alternative to Chromium
Week 25Turn the Raspberry Pi 4 into a low power writing machine
Week 24Keep the kids learning and having fun
Week 23Lots of choices to view images
Week 22Listening to podcasts on the RPI4
Week 21File management on the RPI4
Week 20Open Broadcaster Software (OBS Studio) on the RPI4
Week 19Keep up-to-date with these news aggregators
Week 18Web Browsers Again: Firefox
Week 17Retro gaming on the RPI4
Week 16Screen capturing with the RPI4
Week 15Emulate the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and the Atari ST on the RPI4
Week 14Choose the right model of the RPI4 for your desktop needs
Week 13Using the RPI4 as a screencaster
Week 12Have fun reading comics on the RPI4 with YACReader, MComix, and more
Week 11Turn the RPI4 into a complete home theater
Week 10Watching locally stored video with VLC, OMXPlayer, and others
Week 9PDF viewing on the RPI4
Week 8Access the RPI4 remotely running GUI apps
Week 7e-book tools are put under the microscope
Week 6The office suite is the archetypal business software. LibreOffice is tested
Week 5Managing your email box with the RPI4
Week 4Web surfing on the RPI4 looking at Chromium, Vivaldi, Firefox, and Midori
Week 3Video streaming with Chromium & omxplayerGUI as well as streamlink
Week 2A survey of open source music players on the RPI4 including Tauon Music Box
Week 1An introduction to the world of the RPI4 looking at musikcube and PiPackages

This blog is written on the RPI4.

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Please read our Comment FAQ before posting a comment.

6 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Zeeshan Hasan
Zeeshan Hasan
4 years ago

Is it possible to play the old Star Raiders Atari game on RPi4?

Jonas
Jonas
4 years ago

Thank you for a great series of posts and a good trinity of emulators! I own a RPi 3 but it’s not beefy enough for FS-UAE. This sounds interesting because it’s my Amiga emulator of choice when WinUAE is not an option, simply due to how mature it is and how well it emulates.

Mark Routledge
Mark Routledge
4 years ago

Not a single mention of Retroarch? I know that RetroPie is massive, but not everyone wants multiple distros. I run RetroArch (installed similarly to Kodi infact) and on top emulation station, which performs admirably. FS-UAE runs nicely to.