Could you play half-life 1 on the Pandora?

[ryan27968]

Its all in the title. Could you at least theoretically run Half-Life on the Pandora? It does have Linux support, and the pandora should be plenty powerful right?

 

[Hồng Thất Công]

you need to ask notaz

 

[WizardStan]

Via emulation, the original Windows version runs at about 1 or 2 frames per second. That is 100% software rendering though, all emulated.

In theory the QEMU emulator can be improved with OpenGL rendering, some work has been done to that end but I don't know if Half-Life has been tried since then. Should give a noticeable increase in framerate but I don't dare comment how much and if it'd become playable.

Getting the Linux version to work brings a whole heap of other problems. If it could be run without Steam then maybe, but getting Steam to run introduces an entire layer of problems to work through.

 

[TrashyMG]

Sure it has Linux support, but it's a difference between CPU architectures.. Hardware wise it's more than capable, If Valve ever released the source code it may be possible for an easy port.. other wise outside of emulator which is way too slow or a Static recompile like what Notaz did with Starcraft (which took 5 months to do) and it's very unlikely this process would work on Half-life and if it did it would take a lot longer than Starcraft did.

 

In theory the QEMU emulator can be improved with OpenGL rendering, some work has been done to that end but I don't know if Half-Life has been tried since then. Should give a noticeable increase in framerate but I don't dare comment how much and if it'd become playable.

Well I gave Lunixbochs wine-qemu with GL implementation a spin the results were not that stellar.. although I wasn't 100% sure opengl was working properly. I'm not saying it couldn't be improved at all though.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cYsfCXzIbaA?feature=oembed

 

[elvissteinjr]

Well, it appears there are attempts for an open source implementation of GoldSrc (HL1 Engine) out there. Quick googling brought up Xash3D and sing-engine.
I didn't try them, but they both claim to be quite compatible with the normal singleplayer already. Both are also Windows only at the moment, though and weren't updated since 2011, eh. 
But maybe winelib can do magic there (sing-engine appears to use OpenGL, if that does help).

 

[elwing]

Yes, I wonder if a port of the latest Xash3D could be done now... by the way latest sources of Xash3D can be found there:

www.hlfx.ru/xash/xash_extras.7z

I had to use google translate to find that... why can't they use a github like everyone else???

from what I gathered, Xash3D came first, was abandonned, sing was forked at that moment but was abandonned in 2011 and Xash3D development have continued since then... theses sources seems to have been released in septembre 2013... nothing too old it seems.

 

[TrashyMG]

It mentions Sing is Windows only, perhaps Xash3D is windows only as well?.. but that may not matter if it could be compiled to ARM and we use an ARM version of wine to handle the windows parts, much like how Starcraft is running now.

 

[ptitSeb]

It mentions Sing is Windows only, perhaps Xash3D is windows only as well?.. but that may not matter if it could be compiled to ARM and we use an ARM version of wine to handle the windows parts, much like how Starcraft is running now.

Last time I checked, Xash3D was windows (not much an issue with Wine indeed) but the main issue was it still needed some "binary blob" from original HalfLife for windows. But with Notaz's method, it may be possible to do something.

 

[ekianjo]

Guys, notaz method would not work so well with 3d hardware accelerated graphics. In other words, you can forget about it.

 

[levi]

I wonder, how well does the leaked Dreamcast port run?

 

[lunixbochs]

Guys, notaz method would not work so well with 3d hardware accelerated graphics. In other words, you can forget about it.

Not entirely true
You can absolutely reverse engineer or translate a 3d graphics routine, no less than you can a 2d graphics routine. It boils down to passing arguments or data structures to API calls.

The OpenGL version probably uses immediate mode, which ends up being no different than calling any other series of floating point functions.

Also remember Notaz' method isn't without manual work.

 

[elwing]

Guys, notaz method would not work so well with 3d hardware accelerated graphics. In other words, you can forget about it.

Not entirely true

You can absolutely reverse engineer or translate a 3d graphics routine, no less than you can a 2d graphics routine. It boils down to passing arguments or data structures to API calls.


The OpenGL version probably uses immediate mode, which ends up being no different than calling any other series of floating point functions.


Also remember Notaz' method isn't without manual work.

and I also suspect, without having looked at the code, that most 3d call are in Xash3D rather than in the few possible binary blob...

 

[ingoreis]

I wonder, how well does the leaked Dreamcast port run?

Tried it here but it doesnt start with the actual Version.

 

[ptitSeb]

I wonder, how well does the leaked Dreamcast port run?

Tried it here but it doesnt start with the actual Version.

It's because it's based on WinCE, which is not supported right now.

 

[ingoreis]

HalfLife on WinCE based?

Can we use that in any Way with WineArm?

 

[levi]

Well, it's running on WinCE for SH4 presumably, so you'd need some weird frankenstein of Reicast and WINE just for the handful of decent WinCE dreamcast games.

 

[KillRoXx]

There has been a non steam version of half life 1 released before.

~K.B.

 

[WizardStan]

There has been a non steam version of half life 1 released before.

The non-steam version is the Windows version which leads us back to needing full QEMU+Wine+OGL emulation.If we could run the Linux version without Steam we'd only need QEMU for user mode emulation and pass through most of the library calls.

 

[lunixbochs]

I could probably figure out how to pass through the Steam calls

 

[KillRoXx]

I could probably figure out how to pass through the Steam calls

there are many pirated gamed which come from tpb that are forked from steam. They have an .ini file that links it. i think they modify it so it doesnt check for steam.

~K.B.