Tell me more ×
Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users and developers of hardware and software for Raspberry Pi. It's 100% free, no registration required.
up vote 17 down vote favorite
3

How can I emulate the Raspberry Pi on Windows?

Related: Virtualization on a Linux PC

share|improve this question
Meta discussion: meta.raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/a/122/35 – Alex L Jun 15 '12 at 12:02
Cygwin must be used to run QEMU in Windows. I don't know any other way. – Jivings♦ Jun 15 '12 at 12:30
@Jivings There's a(n unofficial) precompiled version - lassauge.free.fr/qemu – Alex L Jun 15 '12 at 12:50
1  
@ACarter It's not. Because Alex wants to emulate the ARM architecture, just just the OS. – Jivings♦ Jun 20 '12 at 21:21
2  
I'm still disappointed with the quality of the answers here; they are either prone to link rot or don't explain what is going on. – Alex Chamberlain Jul 27 '12 at 15:58
show 6 more comments

3 Answers

up vote 10 down vote accepted
+100

I found a rare gem of a tutorial while trying to find updates for the RISC OS distribution for the RPi. It goes in-depth on how to emulate the RPi in Windows using QEMU. The tutorial is also generous enough to provide a link to the Win32 binary for QEMU. I plan on following this tutorial myself when I find the time.

share|improve this answer
Could you please expand your answer to protect against link rot? Cheers! – Alex L Sep 16 '12 at 12:03
1  
Of course! I'll have it done soon. – Andrew Larsson Sep 16 '12 at 18:53
@AndrewLarsson Soon? – Jivings♦ Sep 21 '12 at 6:08
1  
@Jivings I've been attacked by life which has made my schedule quite busy. It's still on my list of things to do, though! I'd normally do it at work, but I got a new job that's much more time-consuming. – Andrew Larsson Sep 25 '12 at 20:03
up vote 3 down vote

You can emulate the RPi in VirtualBox with relative ease.

Here is a thread with instructions. It's rather straightforward to get this up and running.

EDIT: You need to get Scratchbox and QEMU working with this as VirtualBox doens't emulate ARM out the box.

Here are further instructions.

share|improve this answer
The problem with this is that it wont be ARM architecture. – Jivings♦ Jun 26 '12 at 11:39
Really? VirtualBox doesn't emulate that? – darryn.ten Jun 26 '12 at 11:40
1  
No, you need to use a instruction set emulator, such as QEMU. – Jivings♦ Jun 26 '12 at 11:42
1  
Nice, you have my upvote now. – Jivings♦ Jun 26 '12 at 12:03
1  
If the links die, this answer will be rather useless. Could you summarise the content? – Alex L Jun 27 '12 at 5:30
show 1 more comment
up vote 2 down vote

There is a very nice raspberry pi forum posting about "Emulating Raspberry Pi in Windows the easy way". Somebody all ready did all the work to make raspberry pi emulation in Windows as simple as possible. The instructions are

  1. download a zip from sourceforge

  2. Unzip the file when it finishes downloading.

  3. Inside the folder you should find a run.bat file which will do all the magic for you.

The zip file is literally Raspberry Pi in a zip, it contains Qemu along with the Wheezy squeeze, and the batch file that you run to start the emulation contains the exact command to start Qemu as an ARM CPU running Wheezy. This is the epitome of KISS.

It should be noted that others have downloaded and checked the files for viruses and that the emulation has been confirmed on several versions of Windows. I can confirm the emulation works in Windows 7 Ultimate.

Bear in mind that the default keyboard layout is English GB. If you are using an English US keyboard then there'll be some problems with the | character, to fix it you need to run the configure keyboard option at the Raspi-config tool at first boot up.

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.