1999gaming

Well a nice treat before the end of the year and the compute unit 5 has dropped.

I have one on order which should come on a few days and I'll report back on how it performs

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/use-external-gpu-on-raspberry-pi-5-4k-gaming

I'm still hoping that someone brings out a dedicated GPU for the Pi. Till then this is quite a good article on some of the issues that need to be sorted.

These are:
GPU driver with Arm support
Pi's PCIe only supports up to 5W of power
Then the adapters to get a PC card working

Though the one I really want is just a simple hat type thing that can add some of the GPU features that can't quite run on the internal GPU as well a some way to add a bit more power if needed.

Still fairly sure something like this will come out one day, till then we wait

Got a few more games running under Steam now including
Blackout 2
Desktop Dungeons
Floating Point

And tried a few Linux friendly demos but only got this strange gem running.
Tux and Fanny

So far I've got 11 quite different games running via Steam on the Pi 5 that could keep me gaming on it for a good few weeks. And I'm willing to bet there are quite a few more games out there that either work now or could quite possibly work once Valve support the ARM64 hardware and / or release a Pi version of Steam.

In Steam

PROTON_USE_WINED3D=1 %command%

Paste that into the launch options if you get a DirectX or similar error,got some of the games working a bit.

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/pi5gaming

I've set up a steam group for more on my seamed pi testing

https://youtu.be/zspFc-VDgOw

Part 2

25 more games tested on Steam running on a 8GB Pi 5 this time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avEHNb18Ij0

Video 1 up, doing some more testing today.

Games so far...

SuperTux - no run
Love - works fine
Colorblind - no run
ZombiAdmin - worked on the 4G Pi but not the 8G version. Must investigate that one...
Half-Life - got running better now see next video.
Another World - works fine

Really this is a test of what works in steam more than running at full belt.

To start with looking at games with 8G or less mem rec and not too demanding on the gpu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avEHNb18Ij0

Video 1 up, doing some more testing today.

Games so far...

SuperTux - no run
Love - works fine
Colorblind - no run
ZombiAdmin - worked on the 4G Pi but not the 8G version. Must investigate that one...
Half-Life - got running better now see next video.
Another World - works fine

Really this is a test of what works in steam more than running at full belt.

To start with looking at games with 8G or less mem rec and not too demanding on the gpu.

Life got in the way a bit as well as playing with the Pi 5 for long enough to realise that it was going to take a while for the software to catch up with the changes. So I then put it down for a bit. Got it back out when I saw a hows to on running Steam on the Pi 5. It works but unsupported and only just. Was a chance to try out Ubuntu for the Pi too as it seem to run best on that at the mo.

Still early days for the Pi 5 and have seen there are some software stack updates that give it a few percentage improvements on some games so I'll probably test some of them again soon.

OK so had a bit of fun playing with Steam on the Pi for a few hours.

Few surprises like SuperTux the platform one did not run at all via steam but I bet it runs just fine as a stand alone app.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/269270/LOVE/

This game works out of the box and I'm sure there will be a few others.

Got Half-Life the non source version running but only just. Was quite jaggery even when the resolution was turned down and the frame rates were quite highish. Maybe can get it a bit smoother with a few console commands, did some playing with them to get it a bit better.

There will be some games that will run with Steam but most won't. I did find turning on big picture mode and making my games the default start page stopped it getting bogged down on starting Steam.

cd into box86 in your home dir and right click install_steam.sh and run.

Which got it running but like a pig. Upping the swap file to 8Gb helped get it running better

How to do that...

swapon --show
sudo swapoff /swapfile
sudo fallocate -l 8G /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile

Then these to install more bits


cd ~
git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86
cd box86
mkdir build; cd build; cmake .. -D RPI4ARM64=1 -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo systemctl restart systemd-binfmt
sudo apt install libgdm1:armhf libudev1:armhf libgl1-mesa-dri:armhf libglapi-mesa:armhf libglu1-mesa:armhf libglx-mesa0:armhf mesa-va-drivers:armhf mesa-vdpau-drivers:armhf mesa-vulkan-drivers:armhf libsdl1.2debian:armhf libegl-mesa0:armhf
sudo apt-get install libc6:armhf -y
sudo apt install mesa-vulkan-drivers -y

Next run these commands to install box64

sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt install gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf -y
sudo apt-get install git -y
sudo apt install cmake -y

git clone https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64
cd box64
mkdir build; cd build; cmake .. -D RPI5ARM64=1 -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
make -j4
sudo make install
sudo systemctl restart systemd-binfmt

All with a big thanks to :https://www.xda-developers.com/install-steam-on-raspberry-pi/

First install Ubuntu 64 for Pi 5 it's version 23.10 for me atm.

I tried it on the normal Pi OS and got the steam client running but would never fully work because of the webhelper...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Orange-Pi-Neo-Console

Not much info on this at the mo but it seems to be a new AMD powered handheld from the people who brought us the Orange Pi.

Well 2024 seem to be off to a good start. Seems like the Pi's are back in stock and they are apparently turning out 70,000 a week in the UK, expected to scale up to 90,000 a week!

Also they let slip the unsurprising news that the Pi 5 compute module not likely to drop till next year.

So this Christmas eve I got to properly test out a multi player game test.

I had a Pi 400 running as the game server (SuperTuxKart) and playing some background music. All off a standard SD card with the only noticeable problem that the music would stutter occasionally when loading up the next track. Moving over to a faster drive would probably fix that.

Settled on SuperTuxKart mostly because it had the best controller support from the games I tested. Which were mostly the free and open source games. Also the networking seems to work well and and you can run a headless server for the game.

I still have not got my head around getting the LAN working without internet connection but it's not a problem at the moment. The Pi 400 goes to a small router that is connect to the internet and also to the two Pi 5's that are running the games.

The Pi 5's are running off an SSD drive to speed things up a bit. I've found a good compromise setting where you seem to get a nice look without tanking the FPS count. Give it a hint of lighting and around 30+ fps.

When looking for a nice monitor I noticed some of them had a 5V USB socket on the back. So I had to try and YES! You can run the Pi 5 off the USB socket on the back of the monitor.... But I did blow up one of the PSU plugs that shipped with the monitors. So I grabbed an old PC PSU and used the 12V output from that to power both monitors and the Pi's.

So along with the Pi 400 and router it all ran off just 3 plugs. One for the PSU, one for the router and one for the controller.... Except that was actually running off a large power bank for this experiment and after being on for over 6 hours still had over 40% left. Though it was plugged into a telly for nice sound. I reckon eventually it will work like the Pi 4's and run off the 12V PSU via the USB socket.

If I also get a 12V router too then it could all run of one 12V PSU and one plug. Probably even with 4 computers and monitors.

Though for tonight it was just the two computers and the controller.

So the gaming went well. Was as fun as I hoped and learnt a bit about running the SuperTuxKart local server and which modes seemed to work well with 2 players. The end goal is to get 4 players. The nice thing about this is that you are almost on top of each other. It felt very social.

There are a few things still to work out. would be nice to be able to spin up new player names while someone is playing from the game server (which I'm calling the oven). Also to be able to capture the race results and keep a scoreboard. Which looks like the server might do.

The icing on the top I want to get is to screen capture the races, maybe with a font facing camera and dump it to disc as a split screen 4 way screen with each player's screen dump and camera over laid small in the corner. Have played around with using a Pi 4 to do a screen capture of the HDMI out mirrored to the second display out with OKish results but a bit cumbersome.

I think the logical thing for this might be a CCTV system that can pull it all together. Bit also not ruled out having the Pi 5's stream the screen capture and a connected camera to disc.

One of the biggest things is still the software is playing catch up to the hardware. Some things just don't run ATM and seems to look like early next year there will be some stuff starting to work well on the Pi 5's.

Also need to work on the packaging. Want it to be light and moveable but also robust and stable. The 10.1" with built in audio screen seems a good fit but need to work out some adjustable height system so you can nicely position it. Then work out the perfect cable lengths and the initial idea is probably just the one USB socket per player where the controller is plugged in.

Once some of the software has been fixed and optimised for the Pi 5 then I'll try running some of the other OS's and any other fun 4 player games.

Got it running with a VNC screen capture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfYhc4LUL2I

As the saying goes.... Hardware is hard!

Been slowly getting all the bits in place to make this project work then the lovely people at Pi central decided to drop the Raspberry Pi 5 news... YAY.

As I expected the version 5 Pi seems much more capable to cope with the games software I am hoping to run. It sounds like it can cope with SuperTuxCart out of the box which is great.... OpenArena still needs a bit more power or optimization to get enough fps to be fun.

Have learnt a lot about the hardware and to start with I must say I'm not a big fan of the microHDMI format. Seems a very fragile connector. Also have had a massive learning curve on the networking side. I was using old network cables I had laying around that worked fine to deliver the POE power but not the network data. That wasted a lot of time.

Likewise I've been having fun playing around with how to Netboot the Pis, boot from USB drive and learning how to auto launch programs. As I said at the beginning, hardware is hard. It's so much easier to wipe a SD card and start again from scratch than it is to find a hardware problem and fix it. Not to mention the cost of re-buying things because what you thought would work did not in the end.

If there is one takeaway I have learnt is that what I want to build is not that hard.... But it's no walk in the park either. If you have problems debugging them is a pain in the....

Still not sure if there is a product at the end of this experiment or more a how to build it yourself guide or both. Time will tell.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/overclocking-raspberry-pi-5

The nice people at Toms have overclocked the Pi 5 to 3 GHz CPU and 1.1 GHz GPU. With a nice 5-10% uplift seems possible.

Well Christmas has really come early this year.

As I'm sure you are all aware now the new Raspberry Pi 5 is coming very soon. I got in on day one and ordered 2 from two different companies. One 4 Gig and the other the 8 Gig version. Think I'll be getting them around the start of November.

The main takeaway seems to be that there is at least a 2x performance boost in the real world out of the box. Along with much faster RAM, comms and ports there is potentially ways to boost this performance even more.

Like the ability to run a M.2 drive when the adapter drops. Something I will be playing with for sure. More power too with up to 5A available and now has the option of two cameras, two displays or a combination.

Which has got me wondering if you could run a game, camera and monitor directly from the Pi?

Then there is the overclocking. Not sure what the options are yet but I reckon there could be a few more FPS up for grabs with the right cooling in place.

Can't wait to play

https://hackaday.com/2023/08/25/rpdot-the-rp2040-dev-board-barely-bigger-than-the-chip/

Don't suppose this will run many games but a fun little project.

Hopefully this will lead to easier benchmarks on the pi

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Raspberry-Pi-GPU-Stats-Report

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/qualcomm-one-of-arms-biggest-customers-starts-a-risc-v-joint-venture/

A possible match made in heaven. RISC-V seems to have hit an interesting technology milestone recently that could make it quite useful.... And Qualcomm could have the people to make use of it.

https://www.lattepanda.com/lattepanda-sigma

Not in the cheap end of the setups but if it's mighty power in a small form factor then worth a look.