VCMI on Raspberry Pi?

International board General discussion
#1

Hello there. I stumbled across this project trying to find a linux version of HOMM3, and realized I would LOVE to be able to play HOMM3 on my Raspberry Pi!

Can anyone tell me if this project will be playable on the raspberry Pi’s ARM processor?
(If it’s not, it should be in the future)

#2

VCMI does support ARM processor. Will it be playable on Raspberry Pi? That’s something I don’t know - hardware is something that I’d name as “below recommended”.

If games like Battle for Wesnoth work on it then it is very likely that VCMI will work as well.

#3

New OpenGL engine is being designed to support GLES, this should help to run on RPi, but VCMI may require too much RAM.

#4

Yes, I think it would be the biggest problem, but maybe it can be bypassed by some kind of virtual/swap memory.

#5

Well this really made me a lot more optimistic.
How much RAM is really required? the rpi now ships with 512MB of (shared) RAM (upped from 256). Is VCMI a lot more demanding to run than the original HOMM3?

(Additionally, the rpi now has a 1ghz turbo mode, and of course the GPU is relatively potent)

#6

Memory: vcmi uses ~100 Mb on my system. Including memory needed for system 256 Mb is probably minimum while 512 Mb should be OK.
CPU: 1 GHz may not be enough for smooth gameplay (can’t say for sure) but vcmi should work.
GPU: VCMI does not have GPU acceleration right now so it is unused (and the drawback is high CPU usage)

But all of this is just guessing. If you want to try vcmi on Rasberry - instructions on how to compile & install vcmi on Linux system are here: wiki.vcmi.eu/index.php?title=Ins … n_on_Linux

#7

Thanks a lot, Ivan, I’ll try it out first thing in the morning!
The cpu of the pi isn’t exactly its strongest selling point, so I’m expecting harsh framerates at best, but it’ll be fun.

Do you expect you’ll be able to implement gpu acceleration anytime soon, or is it far down on your list of priorities?

#8

GPU acceleration (OpenGL) is certainly one of features that we want to have. Problem is that right now there is only one person who is familiar with this.

So at some point we will have GPU acceleration but I can’t tell when it will be done.