90s 3D Games on Raspberry Pi Zero question

[amiman99]

Hi, I would like to install most popular 3D doom like games on my RPi Zero, like Doom, Quake 1, 2, 3, Powerslave, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, etc.

What 3D games are available in RetroPi?

 

What would be the best way in accomplishing that, should I install RetroPi or using Linux desktop to install the games?

Anyone tried that?

Thanks

[wierd_w]

Dosbox has an ARM port. 

 

You would need something like that.

 

Retropi has support for dosbox, iirc.

 

Games themselves? Doom was open sourced years ago, but others? You'll have to look for them.

Edited January 9, 2023 by wierd_w

[zzip]

The Pi Zero is on the weak end of Pi's,  it's performance would be similar to late 90s or early 2000s PC at best.

 

As such running an emulator like DOSBOX will likely not have great performance (you could still try, I many be underestimating it)

 

If you could find native ports of DOOM and other games, that would likely be the best bet performance wise

[oracle_jedi]

There is a Pi native port of Doom and I believe Quake.   There are some other native Pi ports of 3D games too.

 

Decide if you want to run the native ports or the DOS games through an emulator.   I started using the native ports but quickly gave up - they are much too buggy, missing features and had bizarre control mappings.  That was a while back and no doubt things have improved, but I found the experience generally just annoying.

 

As @wierd_w and @zzip already stated, DOSBox provides the ability to run the DOS games through emulation.  I found this the best way to go, although I was running them on a Pi 400, so YMMV.  I generally do not use RetroPi as I find it just gets in the way, but I know many find great value in it.

 

 

 

[amiman99]

I don't want DosBox, it might be to slow, native ports for sure, but I'm not sure if I should use RetroPi or run it under Linux OS.

[The Usotsuki]

What about rpix86?

 

I used to use dsx86 and ds2x86, which were pretty good.

[amiman99]

1 hour ago, The Usotsuki said:

What about rpix86?

 

I used to use dsx86 and ds2x86, which were pretty good.

Looks a bit too slow based on the description "The emulation runs at a speed of around 20MHz 80486", I need Pentium at least for Quake 1.

Right now I'm looking at "Optional Packages" for RetroPie and most games that I want to install are included.

 

Thanks

[Sir Guntz]

Does it have to be a Raspberry Pi Zero?

 

You'd be surprised how much mileage you can get out of a 10 year old x86 netbook running Windows XP or Tiny7. Intel integrated graphics drivers are super compatible with Direct3D and software render games.

[amiman99]

1 hour ago, Sir Guntz said:

Does it have to be a Raspberry Pi Zero?

 

You'd be surprised how much mileage you can get out of a 10 year old x86 netbook running Windows XP or Tiny7. Intel integrated graphics drivers are super compatible with Direct3D and software render games.

Yes it does! It's fun experiment to run these games on such tiny computer.

 

So far I got few games running using RetroPie, but there are some issues with controls using joystick, and weird sound/music problem in Doom.

For some reason Doom's music pauses every 1/2s, like it's buffering, anyone have seen that?

 

 

[Keatah]

4 hours ago, Sir Guntz said:

You'd be surprised how much mileage you can get out of a 10 year old x86 netbook running Windows XP or Tiny7. Intel integrated graphics drivers are super compatible with Direct3D and software render games.

All in all Intel Integrated Graphics are awesome. While they're about 6-7 years behind current discrete graphics cards in terms of performance, they're cheap and efficient and extra ordinarily prevalent throughout the industry. Very well tested and vetted. And they are no slouch at video transcoding. Genuine sleepers there.

[Sir Guntz]

3 hours ago, Keatah said:

All in all Intel Integrated Graphics are awesome. While they're about 6-7 years behind current discrete graphics cards in terms of performance, they're cheap and efficient and extra ordinarily prevalent throughout the industry. Very well tested and vetted. And they are no slouch at video transcoding. Genuine sleepers there.

Then there's ATI discrete GPU drivers from the same time period which are always a constant headache, from finding the right driver for your GPU, to dealing with incompatible games, to weird problems like scaling to fullscreen not being on by default.

 

I'll always take the Intel graphics instead, thanks.

[Keatah]

I remember playing with the early Catalyst drivers. Blech!!

[amiman99]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

I remember playing with the early Catalyst drivers. Blech!!

I remember in early 2000s I made a NForce chipset PC for gaming, and I could not get some games to work properly with the system. Always some kind of graphical glitches here and there.

[Keatah]

Shit.. man.. 3rd party graphics on a 3rd party chipset with 3rd party drivers. It's no wonder! Assuming you used nForce for Intel.

Edited January 24, 2023 by Keatah

[amiman99]

16 hours ago, Keatah said:

Shit.. man.. 3rd party graphics on a 3rd party chipset with 3rd party drivers. It's no wonder! Assuming you used nForce for Intel.

No, it was probably NVIDIA nForce 420 or 220 with Duron 1.3GHz. I still have the chip in my drawer, somewhere...