A month ago we reported on the Raspberry Pi having reached the milestone of 2.5 million units shipped. The special occasion was marked by the release of source code and documentation for its Broadcom VideoCore IV graphics core AND setting up a Quake 3 prize bounty…
A $10,000 prize was offered up as a bounty to the first person "to demonstrate to us satisfactorily that they can successfully run Quake III at a playable framerate on Raspberry Pi". Now, only a month after the bounty was first offered, it has been claimed by Simon Hall , "a longtime Pi hacker," writes Ebon Upton on the Raspberry Pi blog.
Apparently Mr Hall is well known in Raspi Circles as he produced the first ARMv6-accelerated copies-and-fills library back in 2012 and wrote the DMA kernel module that which is integrated in Raspbian releases. Now he has successful ported Quake 3 to run on the newly open ARM driver, rather on the closed-source VPU driver – at playable frame rates.
Time to get your Raspberry Pi out of its drawer?
There is quite a bit of effort required by a user to get this new bounty-winning Quake 3 up and running on your machine. Thankfully Mr Hall has written a recipe:
The basic hardware you will need are:
- a Raspberry Pi, preferably a 512MB version, with the latest Raspbian
- a network connection
- a monitor capable of displaying 1080p
- an SD card, at least 8GB (10GB is recommended)
With all the above ready you will also need to download a selection of software and wait for around 10 or 12 hours of compilation time to build your kernel which you will later install before building, installing and eventually playing the game. If you want to test out this open ARM driver version of Quake 3 there are full instructions on the Raspi blog.
Has any HEXUS reader tested out this bounty winning software?
