felix86

Heroic Games Launcher now works on RISC-V thanks to felix86

Version 26.08 adds support for Heroic Games Launcher and for Ubuntu 26.04 on the 86x emulator for RISC-V devices.

Jordan Gloor

Jordan Gloor

— 2 min read
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The felix86 logo, featuring a person with cat-like ears and a tail hugging affectionately a penguin, over a black background surrounded vignette-style with blue and yellow gradients.

Writing in an update for the month of July 2026, developers of the felix86 emulator showed off that its latest release, 26.08, allows the popular open source game manager Heroic Games Launcher to run on computers that use RISC-V architectures.

What's new

  • Heroic Games Launcher support: In the felix86 development blog post, you can see a screenshot of Rocket League being installed with Heroic Games Launcher, presumably through the felix86 emulator.
    • It says to install Heroic, you'll need to download the DEB file from Heroic's download page and then run this command sudo felix86 --shell="dpkg -i /path/to/heroic.deb" with the path edited for your directory.
    • The blog reports that "most games are untested for now," so you'll be in uncharted territory actually trying to play a game.
  • Ubuntu 26.04 support: felix86 now runs on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS "Resolute Raccoon", which released this past April.
  • Support for 80-bit floats: Without getting too technical, full support for 80-bit floats means that certain programs will work better. An example given is GOG and its game installation scripts.
  • Shell arguments: Now when you run felix86 commands in your terminal, you can pass the --shell argument with a set of commands that will run as if you were running commands with bash -c.
    • The --shell argument maintains its own history file separate from the shared $HOME history, by default at least.

What's getting better

  • Bug fixes: Several technical issues were addressed with felix86 26.08. New automated tests were implemented to better ensure felix86 works properly when you're running your x86 and x86-64 programs with it.

Zooming out

Why this update matters: The development felix86 has been progressing every month to make software that wasn't designed to run on RISC-V usable on the open source and more cost-efficient processor architecture. Increased software support makes actually relying on RISC-V for everyday computing more realistic, while more and more Linux distributions provide RISC-V-friendly images.

Behold: 3D Windows games running smoothly on open source RISC-V
The felix86 project showed off 3D x86 games like Portal 2 and God of War running at decidedly playable levels thanks to new RISC-V hardware.
New In LinuxJordan Gloor

My take: I use Heroic Games Launcher quite a bit, and I'm watching the development of RISC-V computing closely, so this is exciting news for me.

Diving in

The fineprint: You can read the felix86 blog to learn more, or head straight to the felix86 GitHub release notes for a more technical rundown.

Get it now: If you want to install the emulator system on a RISC-V device, check out the official felix86 installation instructions.

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