With the QEMU software you can run a a Raspberry Pi emulator in Windows for free. QEMU is an open source application for creating virtual hardware. It is similar to VMWare and Virtual Box. Where it differs is that it can CPUs and they have created a virtualization for the Raspberry Pi CPU (the ARM1176JZFS). Also, all the required tools and kernel tweaks have been made and collected into a single downloadable package. The whole package is available here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/rpiqemuwindows/
To run:
simply download the package (around 550MB), extract it and click on the run.bat file.
Notes:
- The username in pi the password is raspberry
- The image that is included is Debian. I will be posting a follow up on how to change the image.
- The network adapter is setup with DHCP. It gets a 10.x.x.x address from the ‘internal’ router in QEMU.
- To release the mouse back to Windows, hit Ctrl-Alt.
- To shut the emulated Pi down, use the command sudo poweroff.
- By default the UK keyboard is used. RPi come from the UK so this makes sense. See here to change the layout https://wiki.debian.org/Keyboard
- On most modern computers the emulated RPi run at the same speed as the real hardware.
