No, thing was "will it run crysis??" Because any machine long time, years didn't run it perfectly and in max settings. Than doom would run about any machine, calculators to pregnancies testers and so many "definitely not designed to doom".. So there's big difference..
@@jannejohansson3383 I never said anything about playable speeds ;) As it stands, it would already be quite impressive to see the game load and run, regardless of how fast. But I also think you're over inflating the standards a bit. When people asked whether a PC could run Crysis, nobody was thinking max settings, because you needed 4 GTX 8800 in SLI to achieve that back in the day in 1080p. Tons of people played it in medium settings and were fine with it. Hell, I ran it on a Radeon 1650 with a stamp sized resolution and low settings. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. And you're incorrect that it took years for machines to run it well. Crysis was ahead of the graphics card development, but not that much. The game came out at the end of 2007. In mid 2008 Nvidia released its GT200 series of graphics cards and those ran the game quite well. I played it on a GTX 260 with mostly maxed out settings at 1050p with very stable 30 fps. The entire "does it run Crysis" was more of a meme at that point than anything else.
@@jamesfmackenzie Btw, id has open sourced all their engines up to id Tech 4, so you can access OSS for Doom 1 to 3 as well as Quake 1 to 3. Would be interesting to see Doom 3 running on the PI5, because it's a bit more demanding than HL2, but came out at around the same time.
TBF I would hope that 20 years of silicon advancement means that something that needed a beefy machine BITD runs on much lower grade hardware now. Sad fact is that for a good 10 of those 20, development stagnated heavily. Just think of the difference between a computer from 20 years before the release of HL2. That's 1984, and an original Mac with a 16-bit 68000 running ~8MHz or in reality, 8-bit computers like C64, Atari 800 or Ti/99
20 years of advancement in computer scene! Now imagine Cray X-MP/48 from 1984: It's inflation adjusted price was $100.000.000. Athlon 64 3000+, a midrange CPU from 2004, had a lot more processing power than that super computer from 1984.
It's a shame we can't recompile most old games on newer platforms. Would be awesome to see PS2/Xbox games running natively on a pi 5, cause you'd see a huge leap in performance and available enhancements. HL2 runs this good? PS2 games would be flawless. Oh well, computers just don't work that way. lol
@@jamesfmackenzie There are quite a few projects to reverse engineer game engines. If you could find GTA 3/Vice City/San Andreas, those would be interesting to see on the pi. I'm sure they'd run flawlessly. There's also DOOM 3.
Older console generations were really custom hardware. So even if you get the source, it's unlikely that you have everything in your environment to compile PS2 games. But you can play PS2 games on a Pi 5 with AetherSX2. But I had to set Blending Accuracy to Minimum.
I remember when that game came out, my GPU could barely run it (Think it was a Nvidia MX440). So the fact that it plays on a Pi5 show how far tech has come.
Valve is already working on this apparently with Proton ARM, though that wont be native, but i wouldn't be surprised if they make it native when whenever they go public with this. Seeing what Valve's already achieved with the Steam deck and how well it performs, i'm already excited for what comes next.
It's crazy how much texture and lightmap work went into this game. That it looks this good almost 20 years later is just mind boggling. And yes, I'm totally going to have to do a playthrough on my Pi5.
@@jamesfmackenzie So I built it, and played it and you know what... man, how great is HL2. And yeah, it does run surprisingly well on the Pi's (by modern standards) itty-bitty GPU and CPU cores. That said, I'm going to have to look at jacking up the Pi 5's core and GPU clocks, as there are a few places where the game does chug - oddly enough, all the same places I remember it chugging on my 2.8GHz Northwood Pentium 4HT and ATI Radeon 9800Pro... 20 years ago. Anyway, thanks for putting together this video!
@@jamesfmackenzie I'm playing at low detail with a full screen resolution of 1024 x 575. I can play it at 60 fps, but during some sequences it drops to 10 fps and I have to wait a few seconds before it returns to the original fps. I'm using Linux penguin (beta) on chromeOS, so it's likely to be under-optimized. What I have confirmed is that I try to convert all games to wasm for the web browser. There my games run smoothly at a steady 60 fps. So I'm sure HL2 could be compiled into wasm.
This actually has some real life practical use scenarios. In the case of off grid lifestyles or camping, the pi uses such little power that this could really be a great low power low cost solution to gaming off grid. I'd really like a breakdown on the power usage.
I think a digital thermometer would put that Atom to shame! 😂 I have several old single core Atom based Netbooks, they are great for emulating old 8 and 16 bit systems etc and running older Windows games.
Super interesting to think source is just the puppeteer of all the asset files like textures models animations audio etc. like the game is the assets, but source is the mastermind.
@@anthonypimentel7218 yep! Both of those work. Find the build instructions here: www.jamesfmackenzie.com/howto/how-to-install-half-life-2-halflife-2-on-raspberry-pi/
@@jamesfmackenzieBox86/Box64 is not a cheat. In fact, it's a wrapper. It tricks applications into thinking that they are running natively when in fact they are not. If you wanted an emulator, you really should look at FEX. That's a real x86-64 emulator.
@@cyberdude2403 100% agree! I got a bit carried away and started playing through the game again. Up to Ravenholm! 😎 I think it’s possible to get a bit out of the Pi too with some settings tuning and overlocking 🤩
@@jamesfmackenzie "We Don't Go To Revenholm" .. I remember back in the day playing that and the monster with all the spiders on their back, that used to make me jump out of my skin. Do you think Episode 1 and Episode 2 and maybe even Lost Coast to run the Pi 5? The Loat Coast would be cool, because they added a ton of graphics tech into that if I recall. I remember playing Half-Life 2 back on my Pentium 2.4GHz along with an ATi Radeon 9600 .. to think a little Single Board computer can now do all that. This video has made me think maybe it's time to let my Raspberry Pi 4 handle other duties, and to finally get a Raspberry Pi 5. Great content as always James
That's actually insane to think about. I remember having a laptop with Intel HD graphics running this game and I'd get like ~40-60 fps depending on everything. I love Half-Life 1 and 2 more than most people I know in my life.
Me too! I had to upgrade my PC with a Radeon X800 to play HL2 at a decent framerate 😎 PS if you want to see HL2 running well, check at my latest RPi 5 video - it’s running at 4K, 300fps 😂
It was a demanding game when it came out. Certainly a lot of computers struggled to run it at decent frame rates. Half Life was groundbreaking, Half Life 2 perhaps even more so. I still have my original boxed copies.
@@anonytuser711 It does play on Pi5. I use 4.8.1 I think. Run in WINE64. I use ZDL to load multiple mods. Plays myhouse.wad (the pk3.) Guncaster, several others.
I can't see my first post... fing youtube... GZDoom 4.8.1. Run in WINE64. I use ZDL-3.2.2.2 to load more than one mod at a time. What else do you need. You need to be running Pi OS in X11 mode using the kernel8.img. When the GZDoom welcome screen pops up you need to select Vulkan. I think that should do it. I'm also overclocked to 3100/1100 force_turbo=1 over_voltage_delta=80000. 2 of my Pi5 4GB's can run at that speed.
Once i saw this video i clicked on it immediately while clapping my hands like a little kid out of happiness , this was refreshing to see after a hard and tiring week.
I remember in the year 2004 you needed a high-end gaming PC with a fast CPU and dedicated graphics card (something like a Radeon 9800 Pro) in order to play the game at high settings. A PC like that would weigh like 20 to 25 pounds (9kg to 11kg) and cost like $1300. Now a little $35 raspberry pi that weighs nothing that fits in a pocket can run it just fine.
Did you know that there are actually two ways to play Half-Life 2 on the Raspberry Pi 5? Option 1 is the way you discussed in this video, with Nillrusr's open source, leak of the source engine. Option 2 is getting it officially from Valve themselves, and wrapping system libraries with Box86/Box64 or FEX. The way you have shown is obviously the most performant way to do it.
amazing! it was quite blowing my mind when i first time saw HL1 running with the opensource engine reimplementation Xash3d on a pi3 or so. it was buttery smooth. I wonder how hl2 will perform on the pi3
@@MikeScottAnimationi have no clue what your smoking but there is absolutely no way a pc without a dedicated gpu that is that small is ever running cyberpunk within the next century lmao nor does a raspberry pi even need that kind of performance
@@bloom-mania Yeah CPU performance has plateued. I do wonder if you could trade enough cores for GPU like performance. Getting 20+ Core CPU's isn't that unusual today. Maybe dedicate 15 of them to rendering video.
@@quademasters249software rendering, which is what happens when CPU is tasked with rendering, is extremely slow. GPUs are dedicated devices to render stuff, they're just that good at it. CPUs, even the most beefy ones, will never even come close to beating even weak GPUs in rendering tasks.
I'd wager that the Source Engine is already somewhat optimized for ARM, considering Valve has a version of the Orange Box for Nvidia Shield. Granted, it's an older revision of the architecture, but I suspect that does some lifting of this performance we already see here. Not sure whether there are patches for the Apple Silicon here, so I can't theorize whether that's involved, too.
Didn’t know there was a Shield version! That definitely helps explain why the build was so easy 😎 I think the source code is from 2017, so likely pre-dates any Apple Silicon fixes
they probably see no reason to take it down - it's already been leaked, taking it down would just get it leaked more; may aswell just let people have their fun with it
I am SO Impressed that that little SBC Pi can run a AAA Title like HL2 - Granted HL2 has been around for quite a long time now, even still... it's pretty awesome...
You could have a go at trying to get DNF:2001 restoration project source code to compile for the Rasberry Pi. Though it would take a considerable amount of work to get up and running id imagine.
I knew from the start this would be nillerusr's repo, I've been waiting for UA-cam coverage on it for ages! You can run the game on any phone quite well. I'd also love to see a port to vita or 3ds
I was super surprised when I found the repo! And also when it ran so well 😁 I’m surprised there aren’t more ports using this repo - guess I’ll need to try myself! 😎
I remember there's a open source port of the original half life to Android that uses the game files from the steam version . It's always cool 😎 to see 👀 stuff like this 👍🏾
This has made history. HL2 has always """RAN""" on Pi, but never natively, or smoothly. This looks like it's jumped both of those hurdles and made HL2 fully playable on something as small as a cellphone.
This sounds as logical as it should, considering that the original Xbox on the Pentium 3 could run Half-Life 2 and the fact that my old smartphone on the Helio P60 ran Half-Life 2 at 40+ FPS at the highest graphics settings, it doesn't even sound strange that the Raspberry Pi is able to run and keep quite stable this game
I am seriously impressed despite knowing that HL2 is like two decades old. The game still holds up fairly well after all and I could see the VR version running natively on AIO headsets this way. Would love to see whether Portal works too. No clue what you'd have to change when compiling the src but this is crazy cool. Now go back to 2004 and show people back then what this game runs on :,D
this is great !! Wondering how well it run on MacOS given that OpenGL feature support is very bad / abysmal, and according to the github page Vulkan suport wasn't added yet (on the todo list, allegedly). Running HL2 through Wine/Crossover falls back to OpenGL as HL2 is a DX9 title (eg won't use DXVK nor GPTK), and said OpenGL is incomplete in many areas to the point that it uses the CPU for certain features. (for ex, huge slowdowns on exploding barrels)
Really cool! But at what settings is this running at? 480p? What's the fps? Benchmarks please. May be you can put that into the next video together with optimizations, so we could see how much the Pi5 can be pushed in that regard.
@@jamesfmackenzie I'm impressed it managed to run at such a nice resolution. It looked very smooth. How did you capture the video output? Also, how would you rate your Ubuntu experience on the PI5? Raspbian feels quite sluggish, but Ubuntu looked quite snappy from what I could tell.
@@pseudonym3690 I used an HDMI capture card for the capture (AverMedia Live Gamer 4K). The performance is pretty good. If you drop down the settings even lower you can get 60+ fps 🙂
I keep telling people that the Pi 5 is totally capable of running certain games and stuff. You just gotta know what you're doing. I'd like to see doom 3 running natively
The source code for that has been out for a while, but also Dhewm3 and RBDoom3 BFG exist. RBDoom3 reports aarch64 on its Flathub page so that's one click away.
Valve managed to get this game to run on the Xbox original, so this isn't too big a stretch of the imagination. There's rockchips out there that can just barely run Crysis.
The Raspberry Pi was a great little cheap computer costing $35 back in 2011 for school kids to learn programming on or for makers to keep on an electronics workbench for IoT-type projects. If the kid broke their RPi or it went up in a puff of smoke on your workbench because you put the wrong voltage on the wrong pin, it wasn't a great issue buying a replacement. I still use RPi's (and other SBCs) a lot because I'm a Linux SME anyway, I do electronics as a hobby and I also do some work with kids and IT, so I recognise that SBCs have their uses - one of the best value SBCs has to be the Orange Pi Zero 3 which is a bit bigger than the RPi Zero 2 but has up to 4GB RAM (compared to 51MB in the RPi Zero 2) for just a few dollars more, and the tiny form factor makes it interesting in its own right. Unfortunately, most RPi users wouldn't have a clue as to what to do with an OPi Zero 3 because there's not videos about "how to do everything with an OPi" like there is for RPi and so few people seem to be able to do their own research and testing on their own these days anyway. However, where it all went wrong was after the Pi 4 emerged and it became impossible for the Pi Foundation to keep down the price of it, especially during the shortages of the epidemic. What became apparent at that point (at least to me) was that there was a huge number of (misguided) people rushing to upgrade to Windows 11 and dumping their old hardware for sale on our favourite online auction sites. At that point it became entirely possible (and still is) to pick up a used HP, Dell or Lenovo SFF PC containing a 3rd or 4th generation Core i5 or i7 and at least 4GB RAM for the same price or less than the cost of a barebones RPi 4 or 5 that you would still need to buy a case, cooling and PSU for to match what an SFF PC gives you - and that SFF PC has a lot more power in it than a Pi 4 or 5, even if you stick with the Intel on-board graphics. So it's interesting to see a video running Half-Life 2 on an RPi but when you can run it better on a used SFF PC that ultimately costs less, there seems little point to doing it - unless maybe you're turning it into a mobile gaming device (which an SFF PC can never be) but then it doesn't take much additional cost or effort to get it to a similar price to a Steam Deck (which I don't own and have no interest in owning) which you might as well just buy instead.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Agree! I have several of the original £20 model B’s. The newer boards don’t feel quite so “disposable” as the old ones. I still have great fun tinkering with them though! 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie Yes, me too, I love tinkering and always will do. I just don't see what "niche" the RPi fills any more based on its price, compared to what you can pick up used hardware for now. I do think that a new Pi Zero board with more RAM and small price increase would be very interesting because of the form factor and stuff you could do with portability in mind - I think they should have got at least 1GB RAM in the Pi Zero 2, 512MB is just a bit too restrictive.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 They do have quite a few niche use cases. I'm using PIs as media players for my vision impaired granny that lives a few hundred km away. One is connected to her old TV, allowing me to remote control the PI and start any video on any streaming platform she likes to see, effectively turning the TV into a smart TV, but without complicating matters, because she can barely do more than turning the TV on and off. One is an MP3 player next to her bed where I can also dial in and set up audio books for her to listen to. Both PIs are superior to any old laptop or computer due to their low power usage, very small form factor that fits even on a crowded night stand and the fact they can be run via a simple USB port. In the case of the TV-connected PI, it's powered by the TV's USB, so my granny doesn't have to meddle with turning it on or off. It starts and turns off with the TV. Aside from that, the PI 5 is also a nice low power media player. I wouldn't have the space to cram an SFF right next to my TV. I also use it to run old DOS games via DOSBox on it. No point in letting my gaming rig eat 300W to render such old games if the PI5 can do it with 10W. Much less noisy as well. Another PI is connected to my router with PiHole running on it as an adblocker and reverse DNS. Also connected to the router's USB, so it starts automatically when I start the router. Both sit in a small wall mounted box where no SFF would have any space. Also, those would probably eat more Watts than the router. IMO, where a small form factor and/or small power consumption is important then an SBC will most likely be the preferable solution. A niche one nonetheless, but there's a reason why there was a delivery shortage for the PI5. People were still crazy about it, despite its price point. Currently, the 8GB model goes for as little as 80 EUR which I think is completely fair for a computer that can even run Windows 11.
They do have quite a few niche use cases. I'm using PIs as media players for my vision impaired granny that lives a few hundred km away. One is connected to her old TV, allowing me to remote control the PI and start any video on any streaming platform she likes to see, effectively turning the TV into a smart TV, but without complicating matters, because she can barely do more than turning the TV on and off. One is an MP3 player next to her bed where I can also dial in and set up audio books for her to listen to. Both PIs are superior to any old laptop or computer due to their low power usage, very small form factor that fits even on a crowded night stand and the fact they can be run via a simple USB port. In the case of the TV-connected PI, it's powered by the TV's USB, so my granny doesn't have to meddle with turning it on or off. It starts and turns off with the TV. Aside from that, the PI 5 is also a nice low power media player. I wouldn't have the space to cram an SFF right next to my TV. I also use it to run old DOS games via DOSBox on it. No point in letting my gaming rig eat 300W to render such old games if the PI5 can do it with 10W. Much less noisy as well. Another PI is connected to my router with PiHole running on it as an adblocker and reverse DNS. Also connected to the router's USB, so it starts automatically when I start the router. Both sit in a small wall mounted box where no SFF would have any space. Also, those would probably eat more Watts than the router. IMO, where a small form factor and/or small power consumption is important then an SBC will most likely be the preferable solution. A niche one nonetheless, but there's a reason why there was a delivery shortage for the PI5. People were still crazy about it, despite its price point. Currently, the 8GB model goes for as little as 80 EUR which I think is completely fair for a computer that can even run Windows 11.
@@pseudonym3690 Sure, I accept your use cases there - but none of what you have done there cannot be done cheaper and better with used SFF PCs. Why do you need to "cram" one in next to your TV when a lot of SFF PCs can be attached to the back of the TV with a Vesa bracket? As for Windows 11, I've not use Windows since support for Windows 7 ended, so it's irrelevant to my use cases.
I have replicated your results on the latest Raspberry Pi os and it worked first try. Ubuntu isn't necessary for this, just another option. It's really amazing that this works at all. It stutters at high resolutions, especially once you exit the train station and look towards the citadel. But at more reasonable resolution it works fine - probably as well as on my PC back then...
@@jamesfmackenzie I walked through the video and copied your commands to install everything. Maybe you could just dump the four lines into the video description for future reference? That would make it a lot less error prone - since these commands and packages all seem to work without issues.
@@TimoBirnschein great suggestion! I created a quick how to guide and linked it from the description too: www.jamesfmackenzie.com/howto/how-to-install-half-life-2-halflife-2-on-raspberry-pi/
How come all you needed to do to run the game is compile the source code for the engine itself and not the entire game? Is the engine somehow the backbone of the entire operation and the game itself is in some sort of format that makes it universial? Maybe there was enough left in the source code from half life that it could just run without any modification...
@@midlowreborn I dont understand something, this source code for the engine was already meant to be used on Ubuntu right ? How a Windows source would work on RB ??? doesnt make any sense, enven if its c++.
This makes me wonder if xash will run HL2. I never thought to try and I'll have to find my copy to test it with, but HL1 runs perfectly using xash, maybe HL2 will as well.
So we have hit the age "Will it play HL2?"
I think so! 😂
In two months someone will be able to get HL2 to play on a graphing calculator
lol I want to go ahead and claim that it could run Crysis if it was available for Linux/ARM or if there was 3D acceleration supported on RPi Windows.
No, thing was "will it run crysis??"
Because any machine long time, years didn't run it perfectly and in max settings.
Than doom would run about any machine, calculators to pregnancies testers and so many "definitely not designed to doom"..
So there's big difference..
@@jannejohansson3383 I never said anything about playable speeds ;) As it stands, it would already be quite impressive to see the game load and run, regardless of how fast.
But I also think you're over inflating the standards a bit. When people asked whether a PC could run Crysis, nobody was thinking max settings, because you needed 4 GTX 8800 in SLI to achieve that back in the day in 1080p. Tons of people played it in medium settings and were fine with it. Hell, I ran it on a Radeon 1650 with a stamp sized resolution and low settings. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.
And you're incorrect that it took years for machines to run it well. Crysis was ahead of the graphics card development, but not that much. The game came out at the end of 2007. In mid 2008 Nvidia released its GT200 series of graphics cards and those ran the game quite well. I played it on a GTX 260 with mostly maxed out settings at 1050p with very stable 30 fps. The entire "does it run Crysis" was more of a meme at that point than anything else.
It's a good to remember how much having source code available eases up the pain of transitioning from processor architecture to another.
I 100% agree! Now I’m searching for source code for other games! 😎
eliminates the need for using translation layers :D
@@jamesfmackenzie Btw, id has open sourced all their engines up to id Tech 4, so you can access OSS for Doom 1 to 3 as well as Quake 1 to 3. Would be interesting to see Doom 3 running on the PI5, because it's a bit more demanding than HL2, but came out at around the same time.
@@jamesfmackenzieGTA V is being ported to the Switch this way.
@@TheCustomFHDwhere can we see the progress?
2004: Half-life 2 just dropped, better upgrade my $1500 PC!
2024: Yeah, my credit card computer can run this. no sweat.
I feel old
TBF I would hope that 20 years of silicon advancement means that something that needed a beefy machine BITD runs on much lower grade hardware now. Sad fact is that for a good 10 of those 20, development stagnated heavily. Just think of the difference between a computer from 20 years before the release of HL2. That's 1984, and an original Mac with a 16-bit 68000 running ~8MHz or in reality, 8-bit computers like C64, Atari 800 or Ti/99
Half life 2 wasn't really hard to run back in 2004. A budget Sempron 3000+ and Radeon 9600 could handle the game well enough at high settings.
This hit hard!
20 years of advancement in computer scene! Now imagine Cray X-MP/48 from 1984: It's inflation adjusted price was $100.000.000. Athlon 64 3000+, a midrange CPU from 2004, had a lot more processing power than that super computer from 1984.
I can't believe it is that easy. And running way better than it was when I first played it in 2004
Nice!
It both shows how much source engine is optimized, and how having the source code is a blessing.
Thanks to show how it works and how it runs.
Glad you like it! 😎
The irony of playing a game that beats even todays triple AAA titles in board that cheap.
😎
It's a shame we can't recompile most old games on newer platforms. Would be awesome to see PS2/Xbox games running natively on a pi 5, cause you'd see a huge leap in performance and available enhancements. HL2 runs this good? PS2 games would be flawless. Oh well, computers just don't work that way. lol
I agree! I’m tempted to seek out source ports of other games and try them on the Pi! 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie There are quite a few projects to reverse engineer game engines. If you could find GTA 3/Vice City/San Andreas, those would be interesting to see on the pi. I'm sure they'd run flawlessly. There's also DOOM 3.
Makes me think of the rereleased PS2 games for vita.
Older console generations were really custom hardware. So even if you get the source, it's unlikely that you have everything in your environment to compile PS2 games.
But you can play PS2 games on a Pi 5 with AetherSX2. But I had to set Blending Accuracy to Minimum.
Search up "zelda64 recomp" it will blow your mind
Insane how a game from nearly 20 years ago still holds up to this very day - and can run on almost any hardware
100% agree! And it doesn’t just hold up, it’s still an all time top 3 FPS 🤩
I remember when that game came out, my GPU could barely run it (Think it was a Nvidia MX440). So the fact that it plays on a Pi5 show how far tech has come.
Valve is already working on this apparently with Proton ARM, though that wont be native, but i wouldn't be surprised if they make it native when whenever they go public with this.
Seeing what Valve's already achieved with the Steam deck and how well it performs, i'm already excited for what comes next.
It was pretty easy to do! Would be great to see Valve release an official ARM64 version!
It's crazy how much texture and lightmap work went into this game. That it looks this good almost 20 years later is just mind boggling. And yes, I'm totally going to have to do a playthrough on my Pi5.
100% agree! It still looks AMAZING 🤩
Good luck with the playthrough!
@@jamesfmackenzie So I built it, and played it and you know what... man, how great is HL2. And yeah, it does run surprisingly well on the Pi's (by modern standards) itty-bitty GPU and CPU cores. That said, I'm going to have to look at jacking up the Pi 5's core and GPU clocks, as there are a few places where the game does chug - oddly enough, all the same places I remember it chugging on my 2.8GHz Northwood Pentium 4HT and ATI Radeon 9800Pro... 20 years ago. Anyway, thanks for putting together this video!
@@smakfu1375 Great to hear you got it working! I agree it runs great for such a little machine - I played up until Ravenholm! 🙂
Something about Half Life 2 and the Source engine makes it still such an impressive engine even 20 years later.
100% agree! It’s aged super well 😎
Amazing, it works on my chromebook which I didn't even expect HL2 would run. Thank you for the awesome video.
Glad you got it working! How fast does it run - and at what res?
@@jamesfmackenzie I'm playing at low detail with a full screen resolution of 1024 x 575. I can play it at 60 fps, but during some sequences it drops to 10 fps and I have to wait a few seconds before it returns to the original fps. I'm using Linux penguin (beta) on chromeOS, so it's likely to be under-optimized. What I have confirmed is that I try to convert all games to wasm for the web browser. There my games run smoothly at a steady 60 fps. So I'm sure HL2 could be compiled into wasm.
@@filipvrba7462 would love to see a WASM build! 😎
idk why but it made me tear up a bit and made me feel like a fossil, shit's tough man
good work nice vid btw
Thanks! 😎
This actually has some real life practical use scenarios. In the case of off grid lifestyles or camping, the pi uses such little power that this could really be a great low power low cost solution to gaming off grid. I'd really like a breakdown on the power usage.
@@tslim250 great idea! I hadn’t thought of the power usage. I do have a wattmeter on the way. Will give it a try!
@@jamesfmackenzie definitely let me know, this could be very useful as the games i'm playing are from the era anyways!
Puts my Atom N475 netbook to serious shame, what a marvel.
Glad you enjoyed it! 😎
I think a digital thermometer would put that Atom to shame! 😂 I have several old single core Atom based Netbooks, they are great for emulating old 8 and 16 bit systems etc and running older Windows games.
Half-life 2, the new Doom.
We must install it everywhere! 😂
The fact that it's already running this well is truly amazing! I'm curious if you can optimize the performance even more.
Agree! I think partly this is because Valve ported Half-Life 2 to the Shield TV - so the ARM64 support in the Source Engine is already pretty good.
Super interesting to think source is just the puppeteer of all the asset files like textures models animations audio etc. like the game is the assets, but source is the mastermind.
Agree! They really built a proper engine here - not just a Direct3D wrapper 😎
Half Life 2 running on a Raspberry Pi in surreal
Agree! And it runs pretty well! 🤩
@@jamesfmackenzieGreat work! Would episodes 1 and 2 work too?
@@anthonypimentel7218 yep! Both of those work. Find the build instructions here:
www.jamesfmackenzie.com/howto/how-to-install-half-life-2-halflife-2-on-raspberry-pi/
AWESOME video! Love when actual games are run on non-gaming devices
hope you have more ideas for showing that PI capabilities
Thanks for the kind words!
If you’re interested in Pi capabilities, check out my latest video - I think you’ll like it 😎
Amazing! I was expecting this to be one of those videos where someone installs Half Life 2 with compatibility layers
It’s gotta be native! No cheating with Box86 or other compatibility layers 😂😎
@@jamesfmackenzieBox86/Box64 is not a cheat. In fact, it's a wrapper. It tricks applications into thinking that they are running natively when in fact they are not. If you wanted an emulator, you really should look at FEX. That's a real x86-64 emulator.
I was expecting the shield tv android port.
Very impressive. Still a great game Half-Life 2 all these years later
@@cyberdude2403 100% agree! I got a bit carried away and started playing through the game again. Up to Ravenholm! 😎
I think it’s possible to get a bit out of the Pi too with some settings tuning and overlocking 🤩
@@jamesfmackenzie "We Don't Go To Revenholm" .. I remember back in the day playing that and the monster with all the spiders on their back, that used to make me jump out of my skin.
Do you think Episode 1 and Episode 2 and maybe even Lost Coast to run the Pi 5? The Loat Coast would be cool, because they added a ton of graphics tech into that if I recall. I remember playing Half-Life 2 back on my Pentium 2.4GHz along with an ATi Radeon 9600 .. to think a little Single Board computer can now do all that.
This video has made me think maybe it's time to let my Raspberry Pi 4 handle other duties, and to finally get a Raspberry Pi 5.
Great content as always James
@@cyberdude2403 Glad you enjoyed the video! I’ll try out Lost Coast to see how it runs!
Absolutely. 11/10.
Agreed, just started playing it again too! 🤗
This Video Proves my theory of being able to compile Source Engine to WebGL
That's actually insane to think about. I remember having a laptop with Intel HD graphics running this game and I'd get like ~40-60 fps depending on everything. I love Half-Life 1 and 2 more than most people I know in my life.
Me too! I had to upgrade my PC with a Radeon X800 to play HL2 at a decent framerate 😎
PS if you want to see HL2 running well, check at my latest RPi 5 video - it’s running at 4K, 300fps 😂
It was a demanding game when it came out. Certainly a lot of computers struggled to run it at decent frame rates. Half Life was groundbreaking, Half Life 2 perhaps even more so. I still have my original boxed copies.
I just need GZDoom to play DOOM mods on my pi 5 and my life will be complete.
@@anonytuser711 sounds like a challenge! 😎
Me personally
I'd install android on it and buy Delta Touch
Doesn't chocolate doom play mods on pi?
@@anonytuser711 It does play on Pi5. I use 4.8.1 I think. Run in WINE64. I use ZDL to load multiple mods. Plays myhouse.wad (the pk3.) Guncaster, several others.
I can't see my first post... fing youtube... GZDoom 4.8.1. Run in WINE64. I use ZDL-3.2.2.2 to load more than one mod at a time. What else do you need. You need to be running Pi OS in X11 mode using the kernel8.img. When the GZDoom welcome screen pops up you need to select Vulkan.
I think that should do it. I'm also overclocked to 3100/1100 force_turbo=1 over_voltage_delta=80000. 2 of my Pi5 4GB's can run at that speed.
I wish valve would officially release the source code so that we could have stuff like HL2vr on quest
Yet another reason I need to scrape up the money for a Pi 5... Great video!
Thanks for the kind words!
Yes the Pi 5 is a gift that keeps on giving! See my latest video for another Pi Project 😎
Once i saw this video i clicked on it immediately while clapping my hands like a little kid out of happiness , this was refreshing to see after a hard and tiring week.
Glad I was able to bring some joy after a long week! 🙂
I don't know if the Pi 5 is super impressive, or if I should feel really old.
At least for me, it’s a bit of both! 😂
I remember in the year 2004 you needed a high-end gaming PC with a fast CPU and dedicated graphics card (something like a Radeon 9800 Pro) in order to play the game at high settings. A PC like that would weigh like 20 to 25 pounds (9kg to 11kg) and cost like $1300. Now a little $35 raspberry pi that weighs nothing that fits in a pocket can run it just fine.
Agree! Back in the day I upgraded to a Radeon X800 just to play HL2 😎
back then it was "can it run doom?" now its "can it run hl2?"
Impressive. When this released I played it on my P4 with a nvidia 6800gt. Thanks for the video :)
Glad you enjoyed it! 😎
This is insane now i want to buy one of these to make experimental games see how far we can push it
Agree it’s super cool! I’m looking for other games to port too 😎
Did you know that there are actually two ways to play Half-Life 2 on the Raspberry Pi 5? Option 1 is the way you discussed in this video, with Nillrusr's open source, leak of the source engine. Option 2 is getting it officially from Valve themselves, and wrapping system libraries with Box86/Box64 or FEX. The way you have shown is obviously the most performant way to do it.
This is like modding a toy car to be able to drive on the highway
Lol, it's running faster than my old PC when HL2 was released.
Mine too! 😂
Wonderful. It means that it should be possible to run Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines on the Pi 5B. Which would be great, and funny.
amazing! it was quite blowing my mind when i first time saw HL1 running with the opensource engine reimplementation Xash3d on a pi3 or so. it was buttery smooth.
I wonder how hl2 will perform on the pi3
so in about 5 years from now we can play CyberPunk on the next gen Pi...
Almost certainly, yes. Or just stream it in 4k on an even smaller device
@@MikeScottAnimationi have no clue what your smoking but there is absolutely no way a pc without a dedicated gpu that is that small is ever running cyberpunk within the next century lmao nor does a raspberry pi even need that kind of performance
@@bloom-mania Yeah CPU performance has plateued. I do wonder if you could trade enough cores for GPU like performance. Getting 20+ Core CPU's isn't that unusual today. Maybe dedicate 15 of them to rendering video.
@@quademasters249software rendering, which is what happens when CPU is tasked with rendering, is extremely slow. GPUs are dedicated devices to render stuff, they're just that good at it. CPUs, even the most beefy ones, will never even come close to beating even weak GPUs in rendering tasks.
Stage 1: Will it run doom?
Stage 2: Can it play half life?
Stage 3: Will it play Half Life 2?
FINAL STAGE: Can it run Crysis?
Bonus stage: Bad apple
This is amazing and the Raspberry pi 5 really is impressive it can even run emulators pretty well too, such a powerful computer for its size
i followed this on my pi 4, it works pretty good, medium settings even.
Glad you got it working! And double glad it works nicely on the Pi 4 too 🙂
that moment when a Pi can run half life 2 but my shitty educational laptop that has a 1.7ghz cpu and 4gb can't run half life 1
😭
I'd wager that the Source Engine is already somewhat optimized for ARM, considering Valve has a version of the Orange Box for Nvidia Shield. Granted, it's an older revision of the architecture, but I suspect that does some lifting of this performance we already see here.
Not sure whether there are patches for the Apple Silicon here, so I can't theorize whether that's involved, too.
Didn’t know there was a Shield version! That definitely helps explain why the build was so easy 😎
I think the source code is from 2017, so likely pre-dates any Apple Silicon fixes
This would be a cool series "Making Game X run on the Raspberry Pi".
Great idea!
honestly i am surprised valve lets that stay up, pretty nice of them
I agree! Lucky for us that valve is nice like this 😎
they probably see no reason to take it down - it's already been leaked, taking it down would just get it leaked more; may aswell just let people have their fun with it
Nice vid! Thanks! 🙂
Glad you liked it! 😎
it would be cool to include some FPS performance overlay in your next experiments. Great vid!
Glad you enjoyed the vid! Will do a follow up with stats 😎
I'm calling it, Half Life 2 is the new Doom, putting it on everything.
😂
This is absolutely awesome!
@@SomeRandomPiggo Glad you enjoyed the video! 😎
HL2 has become the new "can it run doom"
😎
I still replay HL2 ever few years
Still one of the best! 😎
I am SO Impressed that that little SBC Pi can run a AAA Title like HL2 - Granted HL2 has been around for quite a long time now, even still... it's pretty awesome...
Is hl2 really AAA nowadays?
I agree! Nice surprise to see how well this runs! 😎
Would love to see how the Pi 5 handles Black Mesa.
You could have a go at trying to get DNF:2001 restoration project source code to compile for the Rasberry Pi. Though it would take a considerable amount of work to get up and running id imagine.
We have HL2 in pocket before GTA 6
😂
I knew from the start this would be nillerusr's repo, I've been waiting for UA-cam coverage on it for ages! You can run the game on any phone quite well. I'd also love to see a port to vita or 3ds
I was super surprised when I found the repo! And also when it ran so well 😁
I’m surprised there aren’t more ports using this repo - guess I’ll need to try myself! 😎
I was waiting for "Let's just say your hour has come-come-come-come-come..."
I remember there's a open source port of the original half life to Android that uses the game files from the steam version . It's always cool 😎 to see 👀 stuff like this 👍🏾
Awesome! HL2 in my pocket..
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the video 😎
This has made history.
HL2 has always """RAN""" on Pi, but never natively, or smoothly. This looks like it's jumped both of those hurdles and made HL2 fully playable on something as small as a cellphone.
😎
can't wait for the first pi that will run crysis
That’s… incredible
Glad you enjoyed the video! 😎
This sounds as logical as it should, considering that the original Xbox on the Pentium 3 could run Half-Life 2 and the fact that my old smartphone on the Helio P60 ran Half-Life 2 at 40+ FPS at the highest graphics settings, it doesn't even sound strange that the Raspberry Pi is able to run and keep quite stable this game
not even _Warnings_ during compilation.
what in the actual fuck
I know! Was *very* surprised it worked so well 😂
I am seriously impressed despite knowing that HL2 is like two decades old. The game still holds up fairly well after all and I could see the VR version running natively on AIO headsets this way.
Would love to see whether Portal works too. No clue what you'd have to change when compiling the src but this is crazy cool.
Now go back to 2004 and show people back then what this game runs on :,D
This same build actually creates launchers for Portal, CS and HL1 Source too. So with the right assets (copied from Steam), it should “just work” 😎
You should have surprised us with the kiss mod and use it on Barney. That would’ve been peak comedy.
😂
this is great !! Wondering how well it run on MacOS given that OpenGL feature support is very bad / abysmal, and according to the github page Vulkan suport wasn't added yet (on the todo list, allegedly). Running HL2 through Wine/Crossover falls back to OpenGL as HL2 is a DX9 title (eg won't use DXVK nor GPTK), and said OpenGL is incomplete in many areas to the point that it uses the CPU for certain features. (for ex, huge slowdowns on exploding barrels)
I recently bought a MacBook Air (the cheapest M3 with 8GB RAM). Will have to give this a try!
@@jamesfmackenzieapplegamingwiki already has instructions, it works perfectly
I have had it on my MacBook for months and it runs great with the only issue being the flash light
And occasional crashed
@@jefflem I built it for my M3 MacBook Air yesterday. It runs great! 😎
Really cool! But at what settings is this running at? 480p? What's the fps? Benchmarks please. May be you can put that into the next video together with optimizations, so we could see how much the Pi5 can be pushed in that regard.
Great idea!
This is running at 1280x720, in mostly medium settings. I haven’t measured the framerate but it feels somewhere between 30-60fps
@@jamesfmackenzie I'm impressed it managed to run at such a nice resolution. It looked very smooth. How did you capture the video output?
Also, how would you rate your Ubuntu experience on the PI5? Raspbian feels quite sluggish, but Ubuntu looked quite snappy from what I could tell.
@@pseudonym3690 I used an HDMI capture card for the capture (AverMedia Live Gamer 4K). The performance is pretty good. If you drop down the settings even lower you can get 60+ fps 🙂
This also allows it to be played in mobile phones, I play hl2 and portal both on it.
Nice! What controller do you use?
now, we need him to run doom.
Would have been great if you'd had an FPS counter on screen.
"I Made Half-Life 2 Work on Raspberry Pi!"
*uses already made port for pi*
lol
I keep telling people that the Pi 5 is totally capable of running certain games and stuff. You just gotta know what you're doing.
I'd like to see doom 3 running natively
Great idea! I know there are a bunch of source ports out there. Will dig deeper!
The source code for that has been out for a while, but also Dhewm3 and RBDoom3 BFG exist. RBDoom3 reports aarch64 on its Flathub page so that's one click away.
DOOM 3 has dhewm3 engine open source fork. It is possible, you just have to rewrite it to ARM64 specifications and compile(BTW I think it is existing)
Valve managed to get this game to run on the Xbox original, so this isn't too big a stretch of the imagination. There's rockchips out there that can just barely run Crysis.
8:51 I was about to take my car and drive to city 17 myself to knock that thing out of the air.
@@DJChappie001 😂
Running Half life on arm is something
Glad you enjoyed it!
The gameplay feels like playing the game in mid 2005 era pc.
I agree! I remember playing it on my old my old PC 1024x768, felt v similar to this!
Did you skip over the overclocking of the chip? Clock speed, voltage , game not playable at all without speedup? Nicely done
This is running with the stock clocks. No overclocking 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie oh wow okay you just eliminated thermal throttling with the heat sink fan gotcha!
@@danwat1234 yep! 😎
The Raspberry Pi was a great little cheap computer costing $35 back in 2011 for school kids to learn programming on or for makers to keep on an electronics workbench for IoT-type projects. If the kid broke their RPi or it went up in a puff of smoke on your workbench because you put the wrong voltage on the wrong pin, it wasn't a great issue buying a replacement.
I still use RPi's (and other SBCs) a lot because I'm a Linux SME anyway, I do electronics as a hobby and I also do some work with kids and IT, so I recognise that SBCs have their uses - one of the best value SBCs has to be the Orange Pi Zero 3 which is a bit bigger than the RPi Zero 2 but has up to 4GB RAM (compared to 51MB in the RPi Zero 2) for just a few dollars more, and the tiny form factor makes it interesting in its own right.
Unfortunately, most RPi users wouldn't have a clue as to what to do with an OPi Zero 3 because there's not videos about "how to do everything with an OPi" like there is for RPi and so few people seem to be able to do their own research and testing on their own these days anyway.
However, where it all went wrong was after the Pi 4 emerged and it became impossible for the Pi Foundation to keep down the price of it, especially during the shortages of the epidemic. What became apparent at that point (at least to me) was that there was a huge number of (misguided) people rushing to upgrade to Windows 11 and dumping their old hardware for sale on our favourite online auction sites.
At that point it became entirely possible (and still is) to pick up a used HP, Dell or Lenovo SFF PC containing a 3rd or 4th generation Core i5 or i7 and at least 4GB RAM for the same price or less than the cost of a barebones RPi 4 or 5 that you would still need to buy a case, cooling and PSU for to match what an SFF PC gives you - and that SFF PC has a lot more power in it than a Pi 4 or 5, even if you stick with the Intel on-board graphics.
So it's interesting to see a video running Half-Life 2 on an RPi but when you can run it better on a used SFF PC that ultimately costs less, there seems little point to doing it - unless maybe you're turning it into a mobile gaming device (which an SFF PC can never be) but then it doesn't take much additional cost or effort to get it to a similar price to a Steam Deck (which I don't own and have no interest in owning) which you might as well just buy instead.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Agree! I have several of the original £20 model B’s. The newer boards don’t feel quite so “disposable” as the old ones.
I still have great fun tinkering with them though! 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie Yes, me too, I love tinkering and always will do.
I just don't see what "niche" the RPi fills any more based on its price, compared to what you can pick up used hardware for now.
I do think that a new Pi Zero board with more RAM and small price increase would be very interesting because of the form factor and stuff you could do with portability in mind - I think they should have got at least 1GB RAM in the Pi Zero 2, 512MB is just a bit too restrictive.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 They do have quite a few niche use cases. I'm using PIs as media players for my vision impaired granny that lives a few hundred km away. One is connected to her old TV, allowing me to remote control the PI and start any video on any streaming platform she likes to see, effectively turning the TV into a smart TV, but without complicating matters, because she can barely do more than turning the TV on and off. One is an MP3 player next to her bed where I can also dial in and set up audio books for her to listen to. Both PIs are superior to any old laptop or computer due to their low power usage, very small form factor that fits even on a crowded night stand and the fact they can be run via a simple USB port. In the case of the TV-connected PI, it's powered by the TV's USB, so my granny doesn't have to meddle with turning it on or off. It starts and turns off with the TV.
Aside from that, the PI 5 is also a nice low power media player. I wouldn't have the space to cram an SFF right next to my TV. I also use it to run old DOS games via DOSBox on it. No point in letting my gaming rig eat 300W to render such old games if the PI5 can do it with 10W. Much less noisy as well.
Another PI is connected to my router with PiHole running on it as an adblocker and reverse DNS. Also connected to the router's USB, so it starts automatically when I start the router. Both sit in a small wall mounted box where no SFF would have any space. Also, those would probably eat more Watts than the router.
IMO, where a small form factor and/or small power consumption is important then an SBC will most likely be the preferable solution. A niche one nonetheless, but there's a reason why there was a delivery shortage for the PI5. People were still crazy about it, despite its price point. Currently, the 8GB model goes for as little as 80 EUR which I think is completely fair for a computer that can even run Windows 11.
They do have quite a few niche use cases. I'm using PIs as media players for my vision impaired granny that lives a few hundred km away. One is connected to her old TV, allowing me to remote control the PI and start any video on any streaming platform she likes to see, effectively turning the TV into a smart TV, but without complicating matters, because she can barely do more than turning the TV on and off. One is an MP3 player next to her bed where I can also dial in and set up audio books for her to listen to. Both PIs are superior to any old laptop or computer due to their low power usage, very small form factor that fits even on a crowded night stand and the fact they can be run via a simple USB port. In the case of the TV-connected PI, it's powered by the TV's USB, so my granny doesn't have to meddle with turning it on or off. It starts and turns off with the TV.
Aside from that, the PI 5 is also a nice low power media player. I wouldn't have the space to cram an SFF right next to my TV. I also use it to run old DOS games via DOSBox on it. No point in letting my gaming rig eat 300W to render such old games if the PI5 can do it with 10W. Much less noisy as well.
Another PI is connected to my router with PiHole running on it as an adblocker and reverse DNS. Also connected to the router's USB, so it starts automatically when I start the router. Both sit in a small wall mounted box where no SFF would have any space. Also, those would probably eat more Watts than the router.
IMO, where a small form factor and/or small power consumption is important then an SBC will most likely be the preferable solution. A niche one nonetheless, but there's a reason why there was a delivery shortage for the PI5. People were still crazy about it, despite its price point. Currently, the 8GB model goes for as little as 80 EUR which I think is completely fair for a computer that can even run Windows 11.
@@pseudonym3690 Sure, I accept your use cases there - but none of what you have done there cannot be done cheaper and better with used SFF PCs. Why do you need to "cram" one in next to your TV when a lot of SFF PCs can be attached to the back of the TV with a Vesa bracket?
As for Windows 11, I've not use Windows since support for Windows 7 ended, so it's irrelevant to my use cases.
I have replicated your results on the latest Raspberry Pi os and it worked first try. Ubuntu isn't necessary for this, just another option.
It's really amazing that this works at all. It stutters at high resolutions, especially once you exit the train station and look towards the citadel. But at more reasonable resolution it works fine - probably as well as on my PC back then...
Glad it works on Pi os too! I’m looking at settings and CPU/GPU overclocking - to see how much I can get from this mini machine! :-)
@@jamesfmackenzie I walked through the video and copied your commands to install everything. Maybe you could just dump the four lines into the video description for future reference? That would make it a lot less error prone - since these commands and packages all seem to work without issues.
@@TimoBirnschein great suggestion! I created a quick how to guide and linked it from the description too:
www.jamesfmackenzie.com/howto/how-to-install-half-life-2-halflife-2-on-raspberry-pi/
REALLY cool little project. But next time dont forget to add a FPS counter, so we can see the numbers. Cheers. :)
Good suggestion! Will add it to the next video 😎
How come all you needed to do to run the game is compile the source code for the engine itself and not the entire game?
Is the engine somehow the backbone of the entire operation and the game itself is in some sort of format that makes it universial?
Maybe there was enough left in the source code from half life that it could just run without any modification...
The engine is what needed compiling, the game is just scripting and assets that run on the engine.
@@le9038 No, not correct.
@@midlowreborn I dont understand something, this source code for the engine was already meant to be used on Ubuntu right ? How a Windows source would work on RB ??? doesnt make any sense, enven if its c++.
Gmod for Raspberry Pi is on the horizon.
We can try!
I'd like to see someone try this on one of those super powerful OpenPower Power9 systems that can have full AMD GPU etc.
Would love one of those systems too!
On a related note: I recently saw a post where someone added a GPU to the Pi. Need to try that out too! 😎
@@jamesfmackenzie There is also similar ARM workstations now, I'd imagine both Power9 and that would be about same as x86 computer with similar specs
I wonder how it would handle endian issues, I assume it'll only like LE PPC, RISC-V like the Pioneer as a target would also be interesting.
If half-life 2 runs, it runs css and specially Gmod!
My monitor outputs more power than your "Beefy type C power supply"...
I would like to see Gmod getting run on a raspberry
Will give it a try!
HL2 is my favourite game of all times. I love half life , got a 9800xt, and hl2 came with it😊 good times
A great video card too! I had the 9700 Pro 🤩🥲
❤
Next test Doom 3 and Quake 4🙏
The pi5 is about the same power as a Galaxy S10 - about a quarter the power of the current S Ultra
Running about the same as it did on my mid-range PC in 2004, only I ran it in like 1280x1024.
Have a Pi3 set up for PiHole over my network
I need to get a Pi5 now this just looks too fun
Good luck! 😎
This makes me wonder if xash will run HL2. I never thought to try and I'll have to find my copy to test it with, but HL1 runs perfectly using xash, maybe HL2 will as well.
Screw “Can it run Doom?”. The new age is “Can it run Half-Life 2?”
😎
It just works that's crazy
I was amazed how easy it was 😂
the raspi 5 8gb easily can run source engine and is perfect for servers for games
I like the idea of a Raspi server! 😎
Yeah, I'd love to see how many games you can get to work.
I got Doom 3 working too via the dhewm3 community effort (see my latest video - Doom 3 is near the end) 😎
I’d ask to do doom next but that’s probably already happened