Are there any Rasberry Pi Emulators for PC?

[ShadowTech01]

I am looking for a Raspberry Pi emulator or some kind of virtual machine to run on my laptop. The reason is I want the ability to pop a micro sd card or usb into my laptop and be able to boot Raspbian or any other OS that was meant for the Raspberry Pi from that sd/usb card like it would on a real pi. To me at least this could have quite a few advantages. 

 

One, I don't have a dedicated pi to install software and new drives to test the OS or program, and if I did it would take up space I could use for something else. Plus it wouldn't be portable nor all in one package like a laptop would be. Keyboard, monitor, etc.

 

Two, I am on the move a lot, and if I was working on a Pi project, most of the time I would not be able to work on it until I got home a few days later. Why not just take the SD card or usb drive the os is on and work on the software on my laptop. Do all my testing on it to make sure it works and when I am done I can just eject the card and put it in a real Pi all set to go! Less hassle in the long run and I could probably even just keep a SD card with RetroPie installed to keep around when I'm bored.

 

Three, a tool like this would help a lot with diagnosis issues. Say I'm trying to get something to work but the Pi doesn't boot or something. I could just put the card in my pc and run the program and I can see if it's the software or hardware that's the issue.

 

There is a lot someone could do with with this tool, and maybe features like creating a iso backup to store or duplicate boot drives for multiple Pis sould be a very useful feature. I know things like GPIO pins will be excluded, but stuff like that you should just test on a pi anyway. Also maybe the program could emulate specific Pis? Like Zero, OG, 1B, 3B+,4, etc.

 

Does anything like this exist? My laptop is a Lenovo L380 Yoga i5 with Pop!_OS installed(btw thank you so much Anthony for that video! That is what got me into Linux and now I am a huge fan thanks to you.)

 

Tl;dr, I want a program or emulator I can put a pre-installed SD card or usb to boot most if not all Raspberry Pi operating systems avaliable.

[MR H.]

There you have

 

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/emulate-raspberry-pi-pc/

 

[ShadowTech01]

20 minutes ago, MR H. said:

There you have

 

https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/emulate-raspberry-pi-pc/

 

Has anyone used this before here? How well does it work and is there anything I should know? Would it do what I want and boot off of a pre-installed SD card or usb?

[MR H.]

1 minute ago, ShadowTech01 said:

Has anyone used this before here? How well does it work and is there anything I should know? Would it do what I want and boot off of a pre-installed SD card or usb?

Maybe try to get a .iso from that microsd and boot it from over there?

 

I used it a couple times but finally bought a raspberry

[jakeinbacon]

On 9/22/2021 at 6:38 PM, ShadowTech01 said:

Has anyone used this before here? How well does it work and is there anything I should know? Would it do what I want and boot off of a pre-installed SD card or usb?

It uses a pretty old version of Raspbian by default and I ran it one time and it was also pretty slow. I would check out Raspberry Pi OS for PC and Mac. It's not a one off solution for compatibility between Raspberry Pi and PC because the Raspberry Pi will only take an operating system built for arm instead of x86, but that would be best way to do it besides SSHing into the Pi through a VPN or something similar. That way you could leave it at home and powered on and still be able to access it.