Running closed source indie Linux games on Pyra

[benoitb]

I would be interested in playing games like Hollow Knight, Super Meat Boy or Owlboy on the Pyra. These are 2D indie games that are available on Windows and Linux, I assume precompiled for x86.

I think the best way on the Pandora was to use a software called Exagears ? Does someone have this running on a omap dev board or prototype Pyra ? If so could you comment on the performance of these modern 2D indies ?

 

[levi]

I may be wrong, but I think someone posted to youtube a video of exagears running multiple different closed source x86 games on their devboard. Reportedly, there's some qemu tweaks and patches that make it run nearly as fast or faster than exagear in certain situations, so it may be that you don't even need to pay for exagear to run 2d x86 games.

Spoiler

It may have been Trashy and his devboard, but I don't want to commit to that

 

[AnimatedFreak]

This video shows the Pyra dev board running exagear
The performance is playable for some games however the video is not showing native linux x86 games but of windows games running in wine running in exagear. That probably impacts performance quite a bit, wine can be a bit of a hassle. I imagine that native x86 linux software would run much better as there would be less in between. Of course with some games you might have to also run Steam in between, idk how that would impact performance. I've never experimented with exagear or qemu, however hopefully there will be tutorials on how to set it up the best way on the pyra for x86 games and applications.

 

[levi]

Wine is not an emulator though, so if it's implementation of the windows APIs is anywhere near as efficient as Windows is, it shouldn't impact performance. There'll be a slight performance drop when wine is effectively doing a little work then passing them off to linux calls, unless those linux calls are orders of magnitude faster than windows equivalents.

The biggest drop is probably when wine is having to shim directx api calls to opengl ones, but those look to me to all be 2d games from just before 3d cards became mainstream.

But I'd expect pyra performance to exceed that demo there; that's presumably a simple compilation of the source, with very little optimisation occurring, running on the same core as the game code. A properly tuned wine for pyra could use both cores to their usable extent, use NEON coding where necessary, and apply other optiminsations. It may need someone like ptitseb to tune the library to specific games though.

 

[rygD]

It would probably be a good idea to test the games, as they are more recent than what was in the video, so may expect more resources rather than being efficiently written/designed. I mean, look at web browsing...

 

[benoitb]

This video shows the Pyra dev board running exagear
The performance is playable for some games however the video is not showing native linux x86 games but of windows games running in wine running in exagear. That probably impacts performance quite a bit, wine can be a bit of a hassle. I imagine that native x86 linux software would run much better as there would be less in between. Of course with some games you might have to also run Steam in between, idk how that would impact performance. I've never experimented with exagear or qemu, however hopefully there will be tutorials on how to set it up the best way on the pyra for x86 games and applications.

Thanks for finding that video. Unfortunately we see that the games run poorly and it says in the description that there is no GPU driver providing acceleration. I guess this would be a problem for the games I am thinking about. I don't know what the current status is after 2 extra years.

If someone is nice enough to be willing to try a Linux x86 game I can send some like Super Meat Boy just as a way to test.

 

[Wally]

Hey at least my video is still on YouTube!!

Nothing much has really changed in the way of performance, I tried a few of the same games recently, still requires GPU acceleration.

I'll reinstall exagear and try super meat boy (I have it on humble bundle / steam) but then again there's an Android Version that much just work (TM) if we have it setup properly!

 

[TrashyMG]

Well I've had some good luck with some programs you wouldn't expect. Had the Linux version of Steam running, I ran World of Goo, another game that would just run in Android... 3D acceleration is needed.

Hell @lunixbochs got Unreal Tournament working on his Pandora:
So the potential is there.
[doublepost=1516806928,1516806296][/doublepost]Here is my video of my OMAP5 Devboard running the Linux x86 version of Unreal Tournament, Using the Software renderer. I had trouble getting sound to work, some bizarre issue with OSS.

I linked the video to skip most of my rambling:

 

[AnimatedFreak]

I didn't know running x86 applications on the Pyra would be that good, and it's not even using the 3D acceleration in the video. Damn now the wait for the Pyra is going to be even harder.

 

[Askarus]

I didn't know running x86 applications on the Pyra would be that good, and it's not even using the 3D acceleration in the video. Damn now the wait for the Pyra is going to be even harder.

It depends.
I've tried Visual Studio Code with ExaGear and it was unusable slow for small programs.
Maybe I did something wrong.
I don't know how much CPU Power ExaGear needs.
Maybe I'll do some comparison between ExaGear and native ARM Debian apps later (2 Weeks TM)

 

[Kippykip]

I didn't know running x86 applications on the Pyra would be that good, and it's not even using the 3D acceleration in the video. Damn now the wait for the Pyra is going to be even harder.

Looks at GPD-Win 2 indiegogo