OscarGungan Posted February 5 Share Posted February 5 I have a question about performance running Steam using Debian 12. I bought the VCS on the most recent Black Friday sale. I also bought the PC-Mode USB but it is still on back order. Not sure when I will see it. I decided to take matters into my own hands and bought a USB drive and installed Debian 12 on it. I installed Steam and started playing the original Qomp. I noticed slow down which I thought was odd because I’ve been playing Akka Arrh and Tempest 4000 in VCS mode and it runs flawlessly. I also saw a video of someone running the Master Chief Collection on Steam and it ran fairly well without hardware upgrades which isn’t what we are seeing on our end. Is this an issue that would be resolved by upgrading RAM and adding the SSD. I’m thinking these games would work better if they weren’t running off a USB thumb drive. Or are there settings in the Bios that would would improve performance? Or is the official USB drive from Atari optimized to run things better? Thank you in advance for any helpful advice. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Noelio Posted February 5 Share Posted February 5 I'd up the ram. I put in 32GB ram and a 1TB SSD in mine. It's definitely much faster than having OS on USB stick. Can play GTAV, Fallout 4 etc no problem. I can't remember how now but in the bios (once ram is upgraded) you can allocate more ram to the video. Some people found that increasing the wattage worked well, too. I haven't done that and haven't needed it. Up ram and allocate more to video? Yup. Install OS to an added SSD? Yup. The only tricky part is getting the OS on the SSD and installing a boot loader. It can be hairy so tread carefully there. Someone will chime in with some hints on that I'm sure. All the best! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OscarGungan Posted February 6 Author Share Posted February 6 Thanks! I definitely would like to know about the boot loader. I would like to switch it back and forth from VCS to PC-Mode. When I installed Debian. I downloaded the disc image onto one jump drive and installed it onto another jump drive. So, it doesn’t seem hard to just install it to the new SSD when I install it. But it sounds like that is only part of the process. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OscarGungan Posted February 9 Author Share Posted February 9 If I just installed Debian to the SSD once it’s installed and push the escape button when I boot up the VCS won’t it take me to a screen where I pick which drive to boot from? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted February 9 Share Posted February 9 8 minutes ago, OscarGungan said: If I just installed Debian to the SSD once it’s installed and push the escape button when I boot up the VCS won’t it take me to a screen where I pick which drive to boot from? In theory, yes. But you have to watch out when install Linux, some distros are happy to automatically try to install grub for you What I did was create an EFI partition (boot partition) on my SSD, and made the SSD boot by default. Then I installed refind to the EFI partition, so I get a choice which OS to boot. refind won't work if you have secureboot enabled in the BiOS, so you should disable that or use Grub. Grub supports secureboot but it's more complex to configure while refind is almost plug and play. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OscarGungan Posted February 9 Author Share Posted February 9 Good to know. Are there any tutorials or YouTube videos you recommend? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zzip Posted February 9 Share Posted February 9 (edited) 43 minutes ago, OscarGungan said: Good to know. Are there any tutorials or YouTube videos you recommend? I made this thread awhile back, however the most recent VCS update changed the way AtariOS boots, and the grub entry for AtariOS listed in this tutorial no longer boots AtariOS. When I get a chance, I'll try to figure out an updated entry and update the guide, but in the meantime, I'd recommend using rEFInd instead of grub. (See rEFInd link below) So the rEFInd pages contain a lot of useful information about how the PC EFI booting process works. It's almost information overload! so this link is the page that tells you how to manually install rEFInd on Linux, I just used these steps last week on my VCS and it worked: http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/installing.html#linux rEFInd automatically probes your disk and finds anything that looks bootable and presents that to you with an icon that it thinks is appropriate. So the first time you use it, you might feel overwhelmed with the number of boot options. But you can easily hide the ones you don't need (I think pressing the delete button will hide them), so that you can whittle it down to just two entries: One for AtariOS and one for Debian Also the default theme for rEFInd is kind of gross, there are some nice rEFInd themes around like the ones below: Check this thread for more details So anyway if you have questions or feedback, let me know. I do want to make my guide better and easy to follow. Edited February 9 by zzip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
OscarGungan Posted February 10 Author Share Posted February 10 Hey. Thanks so much. I’m planning to buy an SSD soon and get to work on this. I’ll let you know if I have questions. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.