Don't know if this is the correct section, but I couldn't find any info. Googling is confusing since this is aarch64 not x86 Linux !

 

Inquiries are for generic TV boxes, presumably by @balbes150

 

1. Does any Armbian distro allow playing videogames including retro?

( Steam now has Retroarch in beta.)

 

b. Can Retro games be installed/run on these S905 tv boxes?

 

2. Given that Steam Remote Play and Parsec are screen sharing packages, is it possible to stream server installed games to Armbian TV client boxes?

 

3. How about installing Steam Link/ Proton and/or Lutris?

 

Above are available on Ubuntu Gamepack distro, from my Google searches, but I don't know about ARM availability 😃

 

Are there specific ARM or 32 v 64 bit issues still?

 

4. How "difficult" is it to do some custom development for at least some videogames via donation/ custom projects?

 

What donation level, roughly ?

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. In general any armhf or arm64 package (depending on architecture of the targeted board) can be run with Armbian including retro game emulators. @NicoD did some YouTube videos on this topic, not only with RPi ;). If this steam thingy will run no idea since nobody tried that AFAIK.

b) is basically the same answer as 1 I think.

3. If there are armhf/arm64 Debian packages or sourcecode available install either with dpkg -i or try compiling the source by yourself (usually something like configure, make, make install). No guarantee of success though. There is a reason these boards are called development boards. You are expected to do some tinkering on your own

I dont know about any architecture depending issues atm. Not having proper function of some components on some boards is the bigger issue.

 

4. For personalized support check here: https://github.com/armbian/build#support

 

 

Stuff I missed @balbes150 probably can answer.

@Werner

 

Thanks.

So hopefully there will be more answers.

 

I have seen @NicoD youtubes but they don't really answer my questions.

 

Likely then, #2 (screen sharing) ought to work; this implies all the gpu load is on the server, so few issues?

This is not aarch64,,,

 

THIS IS SPARTTTAA.

Joking

 

There have been retro games for Windows and Linux since the 90s. All you have to do is to try and compile them. If they don't compile because of a missing dynarec for aarch64 than it is how it is, unless you decide to port the dynarec yourself. 

 

The good news however is that there is now 3d acceleration on some amlogic cpus due to the panfrost drivers!

Retrogaming is surely possible. If you mean like retrogaming using emulators, fortunately most emulators are opensource, so they can be compiled on most major architectures like armhf/aarch64 as much as x86/amd64.

 

Actually your mileage may vary, but all the pieces are there and you may need to put them together, so the answer is definitely yes. S905 soc family also is powerful enough to surely run the SNES games era and beyond.

 

LibreELEC, for example, provides a retrogaming section and I was impressed about the performance of a rk3229 box, which is way less powerful than S905, running a SNES game like Super Metroid. The fundamentals are exactly the same since LibreELEC is a linux-based distribution which uses regular opensource software available.

 

If you want to run x86 old games, it depends... if the source code is available and someone happened to port them to OpenGL, there are very good chances to get it work natively. That's the case, for example, of Triple-A desktop games like Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, Jedi Knight: Outcast, Revolt, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 and many others. These are old (but not so old) demanding 3D games.

 

On the other side, if source code is not available, you need an x86 emulator to run the executables, but here performances will suffer and probably you will only be able to run very old games. I don't know if DOSBox can be useful here.

 

Steam is totally another thing. First it is not opensource, but this is not important since desktop games are not available for any ARM architecture, and probably they never will be until ARM will start having some market share in the desktop area. So forget about steam and any steam related things for now.

 

 

@jock

 

Appreciate the details 🙂

 

But how about #2 on my OP?

 

Parsecgaming.com is screen sharing whereby the server hosts the game, and streams it to clients ( Armbian Amlogic / RK TV boxes ?)

 

So will Parsec gaming work with Armbian tv boxes ?

 

( Steam  Remote Play Together is the Parsec equivalent of screen sharing, with Steam chat included.)

2 hours ago, shippy said:

@jock

 

Appreciate the details 🙂

 

But how about #2 on my OP?

 

Parsecgaming.com is screen sharing whereby the server hosts the game, and streams it to clients ( Armbian Amlogic / RK TV boxes ?)

 

So will Parsec gaming work with Armbian tv boxes ?

 

( Steam  Remote Play Together is the Parsec equivalent of screen sharing, with Steam chat included.)

I don't know about parsecgaming.com

I guess they have their own client, if it so it is quite sure they don't support anything else than x86, but you should ask them for the details.

Parsec does have clients for Linux, Mac, Android and Windows x86, and RPi !

 

But I will ask specifically ☺️

 

My question was really about whether these screen sharing clients would need a lot of gpu. But I think not- that is the while point of screen sharing: light clients, beefy server.

8 hours ago, shippy said:

Parsec does have clients for Linux, Mac, Android and Windows x86, and RPi !

 

But I will ask specifically ☺️

 

My question was really about whether these screen sharing clients would need a lot of gpu. But I think not- that is the while point of screen sharing: light clients, beefy server.

If RPi is supported, there are some chances a client will also work on generic ARMv7 devices, but this will depend on how much the client depends on the RPi video and graphics peculiarities like hardware video decoding and presentation.

I have sent them an email, but there is hope:

https://support.parsecgaming.com/hc/en-us/articles/360001562772-All-Advanced-Configuration-Options

 

Decoder settings are both hardware and software, so the gpu /"video card" may not matter much.

 

The Linux download is a .deb file:

https://parsecgaming.com/downloads/