That timeless masterpiece by Half life 2 returns to being the protagonist of the scene again thanks to the work done by zbiosa Reddit user who ported the title to a few ARM platforms including Raspberry Pi 4 it’s a MacBook Air equipped with SoC M2.
The result of this work can be seen in the video posted by zbios himself on Reddit – you can find it just below – and it shows us how the port still has much room for improvement before it can be considered playable, however this is not the primary purpose for which the experiment was carried out. As zbios also points out, in fact, the basic idea was to discover if Valve’s Source graphics engine could also run on ARM platforms and in this respect the result seems to have been achieved.
As for performance there is still a lot to do on Raspberry Pi 4since the title runs in 720p at 15-20fps with a mix of low and high settings (remember the game is from 2004), while drops down to 10 fps if you push the resolution higher, i.e. 1080p. In any case, the primary purpose was achieved – that is the native execution of the code – and this was possible thanks to a leak of the source code of Team Fortress 2 which took place in 2018, from which it was possible to recover the code underlying the graphics engine.
We therefore started from here for the realization of the porting of Half-Life 2 on Raspberry Pi 4, while for the build dedicated to Apple Silicon M2 we proceeded with a mod of the new build. Playback on the M2 is significantly better than on Raspberry Pisince in this case they touched peaks of 300-400 fps, which demonstrates how easy it would be for Valve to convert many of its older titles to run natively on Apple’s new SoCs. On the other hand, there are Android versions of Half-Life 2 and Portal made exclusively for Nvidia Shield in 2018, so the conversion work shouldn’t be that problematic.
Half-Life 2 Running on Raspberry Pi 4 Natively
by u/zbios in HalfLife
