Demo – Raspberry Pi running Quake 3

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Here’s something to liven up your weekend: a video of the Raspberry Pi running Quake 3. We’re still working on ironing a few kinks out (specifically, there seems to be a library issue which means our framerate, while good, isn’t quite as spectacular as we know it can be; we’re working on it as I post this) – but this is what test boards are for, and we’re making great progress getting the boards running smoothly.

I know some of our forum members are interested in building custom cases for your own Raspberry Pis, and have been asking about the heat that the board generates when it’s working hard. We feel you should be fine with the sort of thermoplastic cases that some of you are hoping to make using 3d printers: the chip doing all the work in this clip was still under body temperature after I’d filmed this demo four times, and feels surprisingly cool to the touch. This is also, of course, great news for power consumption. I hope that some of you can come to one of the conferences we’ll be participating in over the next few months (details will appear here on the blog and on the forums later when we’re confirmed) and have a look for yourselves.

Obviously, the Raspberry Pi isn’t intended as a gaming platform, but it’s very satisfying to let the Broadcom BCM2835 application processor off the leash (yes, I’m allowed to give you the part number now) and see what it can do in this sphere nonetheless. As Eben notes in the clip above, we’re hoping to show you a video of a bunch of us playing Q3 Deathmatch on some networked Raspberry Pis in a few weeks’ time – just because we can.

 

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About liz

Liz volunteers full-time for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. She runs the community, does the Foundation's PR, stuffs envelopes with the stickers you buy, works with the press, takes the photos and videos you see here, and also wields a soldering iron in emergencies. Liz is also a food blogger, an award-winning freelance writer and a freelance editor. She has a background in educational publishing. Liz is responsible for all the They Might Be Giants lyrics which mysteriously found their way into Learning and Teaching Scotland's online material, and bakes a mean flapjack – you can read more about her at her blog, http://www.gastronomydomine.com.

216 thoughts on “Demo – Raspberry Pi running Quake 3”

  1. nice. runs really well and put closed captions on to transcribe the audio before playing the video — hehhehehehehehehe

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      • I remember using some early speech recognition package or other to try to transcribe some maths for a friend while I was at university in the 90s. It came out with beautiful poetry: “Gravity moon noon…” (Turns out that the names of Greek letters don’t transcribe well.)

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  2. Its a shame that Broadcom do not appear to have made the specs for the application processor publicly available yet.

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  5. Impressive!

    But … apparently Quake 3 is available for ARM? Or is Quake 3 available as Open Source, and have you compiled it for the RaspberryPi?

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  7. Very impressed with that framerate honestly even with the library issues, it makes my smartphone that costs more than a RasPi every month cry.

    How much RAM was the board this was running on equipped with?

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      • Quite extremely awesome and very surprising, could’ve sworn a fresh installation of ubuntu 10.10 (i.e. pre-gnome 3 weirdness) uses 220MB of RAM idling but then I guess that’s got a lot of bloat anyway.

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          • Aye, did read that but my point was that what we’d normally consider low memory usage really isn’t. Heck, on half the RAM Ubuntu uses idling they’re running quake 3 :D Fantastic!

      • How easy is it to allocate main memory to and from video memory? If I want to use this board as server only, can I allocate, for example, 32Mb for video ram?

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        • the amount of reserved video memory should be settable on the cmdline in the defconfig for the kernel. For instance if you knew you were only ever gong to use a 3.5″ LCD on the r-pi you could get away with setting 2MB of ram for video and it would be plenty.

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      • Could you keep notes & post them, on what you did to speed up the framerate. some of the rest of us may need to do it for other machines down the line. helpful hints/ideas are always welcome

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  8. That’s a really neat demo Liz, will you guys take requests for apps. that people might like compiled and run on the r-pi?

    I would like to see Stellarium run on the PI, it would be very intriguing to see the framerates you get from a model a and b.

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    • At the moment, we’re not thinking of taking requests – we’ve got enough work on our hands getting them ready and out of the door! I’m pretty sure that as soon as they get into the hands of the community, though, we’ll start seeing all kinds of stuff compiled and running. (I know, I know – I’m very impatient about it all too!)

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      • No worries Liz, I understand, of course, if you should get bored playing quake3 one night you could always give stellarium a run out ;)

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          • ? it’s not supposed to be exciting :) It’s a realtime representation of objects in 3d space that allows you to control stepper motors on a telescope mount. As the r-pi is going to be a learning tool of some kind it would be nice to see if it can do some real science rather than games.

    • I might try and get Stellarium running – that would be quite interesting! Few other bits I need to get working first though!

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  11. Is the graphic drivers (for xorg) available from the debian repos or will there be a need to compile it?

    Since it’s always a headache to get xorg properly working on non standard devices,will you give a proper xorg.conf too(to get opengl/dri properly working)?

    Same question about pulseaudio/alsa…

    Thanks

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      • I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you were responding with excessive efficiency and not as a savvy politician who steers around a potentially disappointing response.

        The question was not “will drivers be available”. The question assumed that drivers will be available because it concerned the nature of these drivers. Is the hardware FULLY covered by free OPEN SOURCE drivers? Will drivers be distributed THROUGH Debian, or through a third party? What is the nature of the drivers that will be available? How are they licensed? How are they distributed? How are they supported?

        I know these are tough questions, and the answers might throw water on many people’s burning desire for this board. However, thorough, quality answers are important.

        Many hobbyist have have been around the block when it comes to these projects boards. They can be cheap. They can be loaded with “features”. They can “run Linux”. You buy one or two or three, and then you realize that you didn’t buy anything because your entire experienced is curated by a vendor on whom you rely for kernels, drivers, and libraries. It’s all out of your hands, and you can’t do anything until they say you can. Suddenly, you can’ update software or upgrade software or do something that you want to do because something “isn’t ready yet”. Then one day, your vendors moves on and your platform is essentially abandoned, and your perfectly functional board becomes unused before it was really useless. In these situations, you really didn’t buy anything, you just leased it in a very messy way thanks to driver problems.

        This is a cool project, and it has its place. Many of us are wondering if its place is with it. Many team members are part of Broadcom, who historically aren’t as Linux friendly as many of us would like. One again, this is a cool project, but I think a lot of us would agree that the real axis on which innovation is needed is freedom, not price. There are A LOT of cheap boards, but very few free ones.

        So, let’s try this again. What is the nature of the drivers that support the hardware? Will the hardware be supported by free open source drivers that can be distributed through Debian (allowing the community to continue supporting the hardware by supporting the driver source), or will the hardware be supported by something else which will require us to be perpetually dependent on the volunteerism and good will of a third party until it runs out?

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        • I don’t think you’re being very constructive here (although I like the suggestion that I’m a good politician – what I *actually* am is a very tired person!). It’s unlikely the drivers will be open source; if that pisses you off, you’re very welcome to go and buy another small-board machine. We believe strongly that price innovation is of utmost importance in democratising computing, and while we really *are* dedicated to open source hardware, we also have to live in the real world; if you think you could do better at the price we’re trying to hit, I’d like to know how!

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          • Liz, I don’t think that open-sourcing the drivers could hamper your efforts to sell this *amazing* board at your target price. It’s actually quite the contrary: it would enable the Linux community to *help you* mantain (and why not, improve) the drivers in the times to come.

            Just my two cents. ;-)

          • Not constructive? I think this is the most constructive comment in the whole thread.

            I’ve worked with multiple of these small ARM boards, like the BeagleBoard, and crappy driver support is causing a *lot* of frustration in most cases, and in some cases it makes the whole board useless.

          • In reply to Greg (Aug 29), I can second this with my own experience of a supposedly open source machine. The “Neuros OSD” digital video recorder. It’s a nice little bit of kit. The OS and all of the Neuros application code is fully open source.
            But that’s where the story ends. Several years ago it was a valliant attempt to make something the world could fiddle with and customise as they see fit – however what this means in practice is that we might be able to write new applications (I’m thinking of making an EPG) or possibly recompile a new kernel. A friend has recompiled and installed a newer EABI kernel which seems to be working nicely, only there are issues with getting the older hardware/DSP drivers working with the newer kernel. The drivers? Closed source. All written by Ingenient, which no longer exists (it is a different company now).
            The hardware itself? A TI DM320 chip. There’s scant reference on TI’s website, and upon me – a European – contacting the European support centre, I was given the brush off with a reference to US Export Law and, and I quote verbatim “I am please to inform you that we are unable to process you inquiry”. I fired up Google translate and ripped a copy of the three-part datasheet from a Chinese server. It’s a processor chip! There’s nothing in there that you wouldn’t find in any number of other datasheets, but without it it’s just a dead piece of silicon.

            I believe this more than anything else is what helped the OSD to not reach the heights of its possibilities. There is so much the thing could have been, but even a set of small tweaks such as “output AVI instead of MP4″ or “play Acorn Replay video” is simply not going to be possible. All we could really do is fiddle with the OS or fiddle with the UI. The serious issues (USB driver only ‘knowing’ mass storage devices, flakey SD card support, etc) were off limits.

            Now I believe this rant^Wcomplaint relates considerably less to the RaspberryPi as it is aimed at a more general purpose use, thus it should not suffer the same problems as the OSD. I could run a desktop, or web server, or mail server, or all three.
            However, it is worth mentioning that I just Googled for “Broadcom BCM2835″ and found nothing but references to RaspberryPi in the first two screenfuls. I then went to Broadcom’s site, to encounter “Your search – 2835 – did not match any documents. No pages were found containing “2835″.”
            Really? Seriously? This all over again?

            When will the hardware guys realise that open hardware is just as important as the software being run open it. The RaspberryPi board might provide a cool load of GPIO ports for hooking up to stuff, or adding an LCD, but without datasheets, how are we supposed to do this?

            This, of course, won’t stop me buying one – I have applications in mind where the chip being a black box is just fine. However it might be worth the RaspberryPi guys having a quiet word with Broadcom to see about getting some info released. After all, surely it is in their interests too? More people playing with the RaspberryPi’s BCM2835 will be less people playing with a competitors OMAP-based board, no? :-)

        • In reply to aftermath…a couple of points

          If the drivers already do everything that 99.9% of people need do they need to be OSS?

          What the drivers provide is an API to the GPU. That is, there are drivers for OpenGL, VG and MAX. All they do under the skin is convert the API in to messages passed to the GPU. The GPU code is proprietary, and won’t be open sourced, but since the only people who know how the hell that code works are Broadcom, it makes no difference (and it is already optimised to an extent most people wouldn’t believe, so no need to have access to it!). So, the Linux kernel drivers simply convert a public API to messages – not very interesting, and not an area where the OS community would be able to make noticeable improvements.

          As said elsewhere, the kernel itself is standard Debian, so no reliance on the vendor there.

          Friday, I downloaded Xorg and XDE from the Debian Arm repos, and it worked first time on the Pi prototype.

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          • I certainly hope you guys ahve good suport from broadcom, unfortunately in the past working with them was a nightmare for a project I worked on, unfortunately powerVR was not much better, TI, etc… Without a full manual and specs from this ship I would have trouble making any comments, but performance seems to be nicer than on my ISEE IGEP system, so I will definetly pick a few boards…

            Are you guys using debian, or embedded debian? The latter would make more sense for this board. Anyway I am sure that all sorts of OSes will be running atop this thing… it would be itneresting to have Android running on it, PowerVR has nice support for Android in their OpenGL ES drivers…

            Amazing price, and impressive performance from what I can see. Well done, hope that you guys are lucky with vendors though, i have seen many projects on hold for years because a vendor would not distribute their drivers (TI i am looking at you).

  13. Wow! That’s a really impressive demo. I’ll play around deathmatch with you. Super cool to see you guys just plugging away. I can’t wait to get my own. Keep up the good work.

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  14. Srsly ?
    Works that well on a computer THAT tiny ?
    My atom+intel crappy IGP eeepc is currently burning in shame

    Also, like the other guy said before, it cost less than just the subscription of my smartphone, and does so many shitloads more stuff !

    When you release it, please give me a call, seriously, i’ll buy trucks of these !

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    • While this is a good demonstration of what the device can do, you should know that it is not a very good demonstration of the FPU capabilities of the device. id Software went to great lengths use the FPU as little as possible while the game is running. They go so far as to re-implement all trig functions to be fancy array look ups.

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        • The example of replacing the trig functions with array look ups is in bg_lib.c as defined in the array called sintable. The functions do the look up follow the table. While this method to figure the sin function only applies to the VMs, most places that use the trig functions outside the VMs ( in the renderer, for example ) only use happen once per frame per object. I can’t site a particular third party source for this analysis. I just spent some time grepping through the code to re-verify this. It was something I figured out several years ago from working with the code.

          The sqrt (square root) function (again only in the VMs) uses an iterative method to get an approximation.

          It could just be that there is some significant overhead to doing floating point in the VM, however, it makes sense that they would do this. At the time quake3 was released there were several CPUs (I’m looking at you AMD) in widespread use that had really crummy FPU performance.

          Also, back when quake3 was still a common benchmark it was not a good indicator of FPU performance. That was usually up to a POVRAY benchmark or something similar. 2 CPUs would have comparable quake 3 performance and in POVRAY one (almost always the intel chip if we limit ourselves to x86 consumer cpus from that era) would destroy the other.

          I’m not trying to be argumentative or anything. I’m just trying to help the original poster understand that this may not be the best indicator of FPU performance as his question seemed to imply. That’s all. I think this is great project and I hope you succeed.

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        • I should clarify something. I’m not trying to say the FPU doesn’t matter. While a better FPU certainly helps quake 3, its performance is not as directly linked to the FPU performance as one might expect it to, being a 3d game.

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          • The floating point is that provided by Arm on the Arm11, so that is the baseline. That said, the real hard work for the 3D is done using the GPU via OpenGL, which doesn’t use the Arm FP unit, it has its own internal processing units (and there are quite few of those) so the Quake Demo is a demo of the performance of the GPU more than any thing else.

  17. Max, I think this demo is running Quake directly on a CLI version of Debian, so without X, window manager or desktop environment.

    And a CLI (or “server”) version of Debian and Ubuntu will need very little RAM; probably it will work very well in 64MB or 128MB.

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  20. This is marvellous, I seriously cannot wait to get hold of this !
    From the description you are running with a low current consumption. What are you getting down to while running Quake 3 ?

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      • 150mA while running Q3? Insane!

        Get your beta boards ordered already and start taking pre-orders, can’t wait to get my hands on a few. Not too fussed about graphics performance myself, I have some server & embedded applications on mind (pre-packaged media server, anyone?), but nice to know that these things hold their own.

        Ooh just a thought about packaging…. make it look like a raspberry pie!

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      • Back of envelope maths says that with a netbook battery (so 11v and 4000-ish mAh) that’s about 60 hours of quake 3 on a single charge. Add a solar panel and you can play it forever. Sure as heck beats the P4 machines we used to use to play this game :D

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          • hmmmm! What’s the max power draw measured at? Thinking…. could the whole thing be powered by USB?

            Not really fussed about power requirement for display devices myself as the applications I have in mind will mostly be headless. Or plugged into the back of a TV ;)

          • It’s a USB host rather than a USB device so you can’t power it over USB – perhaps in later versions.

      • 150mA?!? OMG – I could run it for three and a half hours off an alkaline PP3, and that tiny 7.2v 2000mAh cell in my helicopter would run it for … bloody hell!
        That’s it. The moment you guys change your mind about pre-orders, I’m signing up for one.

        150mA? To run that?

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  21. Pingback: Demo – Raspberry Pi running Quake 3 | Raspberry Pi | Indie Gaming | Scoop.it

  22. Hey, very interresting ! oh cool it is !
    even if it cost 50 €, I’ll buy it two of them :O
    in the future do you think that we can run android on that board ?

    Yld

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  23. Pingback: Raspberry Pi: A $25 ultra-low-cost computer that can run Quake 3 | ZDNet

  26. Pingback: Raspberry Pi: A $25 ultra-low-cost computer that can run Quake 3 | News Updates

  27. Pingback: Quake III a pila | Siamo geek

  29. I know you guys are set on 128/256MB of ram but what is the actual maximum ram size the BCM chip can handle? I’m sure there are people on here that aren’t averse to using a hot-air station to desolder the ram and put a bigger stick on themselves.

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  30. Pingback: Raspberry Pi: A $25 ultra-low-cost computer that can run Quake 3 | News 247 Tech

  31. Wow, didn’t expect the device even boot up Quake 3, let alone run it at a (OK-ish) speed. It demonstrates it has more than enough grunt for students to develop games on and learn some OpenGL.

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  32. Looks very impressive! My only concern is playing Qauke delayed the handing in of all my assignments at college! Will it delay the release of the final board!?

    On a more serious note, these boards may have quite a few industrial applications. I use multiple computers to monitor processes, but by using a handful of these and a switch to a central monitor/keyboard/mouse, the cost saving / ease of use is enormous. Hopefully a whole field of developments may grow from industrial use.

    Best of luck, and I look forward to the general release!,
    Martyn

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  33. Wow this looks AWESOME! I am a complete noob at anything ARM and programming related but would I be correct to assume that these can do Java in hardware (Jazelle)? It’d be interesting to see if you could get Minecraft running on it.

    I’ll have to get one of these when they launch and dip my toes into the world of ARM, Linux and compiling programs! Very cool stuff indeed :)

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  34. Right, I’ve read the specs, so apologies for asking questions that I could have found the answers to without bothering you!

    Also, another thing that stood out:

    Hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode.

    XBMC or something would be ridiculously awesome on this!

    I NEED to get one of these!

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    • XBMC is indeed one of my initial thoughts for this device, I’m still running an original US Xbox on a 300 watt step-down transformer for this application (yes I should have replaced the powerboard yonks ago I know), but it struggles with HD content.

      A tiny custom box and this nicely priced low power device with XBMC over Debian could be quite an awesome prospect.

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      • Why OpenMAX instead of vdpau? I’m hoping there will be an easy way to throw h264 video at the decoder. I’m hoping it can be done without much modification to existing software. In other words, will media applications be able to use this for access to the hardware decoder at launch?

        I must confess, I am not that familiar with OpenMAX. With vdpau, I would have assumed that media programs like mplayer, Boxee, Mythtv, XBMC, and others would be able to utilize the hardware video decoder without much modification. I wonder if the close soured apps, such as Skype or Flash use vdpau and won’t be able to take advantage of OpenMAX.

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          • How will applications access the hardware accelerated h264 decode? I don’t think there is a way to just make it automatic. At least with mplayer, it is done with a combination of XvMC and vdpau support, as far as I know.

            Will that be primarily through OpenMAX? If I want to use mplayer, for instance, to play h264 video files, will I need to modify it to use OpenMAX to get the hardware accelerated h264 decoding? If I want to use Skype or Google Talk Video, which one won’t be able to modify even if one wanted to, will there be a way to get Skype to use the hardware accelerated h264 decoding?

          • By the way, I wish I could retract my examples of “skype” and “google talk video” as they won’t run on ARM anyways. I was just trying to think of some binary only application that might want to do h264 video decoding to illustrate my question.

            In essence, I’m really just wondering: From an application’s perspective, how do you utilize the h264 decoding. Is it only through OpenMAX? Perhaps I should just wait for documentation :-)

    • Well, you do get a case, software and various other bits and pieces with the Roku, but yes, it’s the same basic SoC. So, if you see a Roku, you should be able to do much of what it can do on a Raspi, providing you can plug together the software.

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    • Eben attends the OpenGL ES working group at Khronos (he’s group chair of OpenVG) – and the chipset has OpenGL ES. I don’t think you’ll find many desktop games which will run unmodified on the Raspi, but many have patches (we had to modify Quake 3 ourselves, but it’s very doable, and I’m hoping we’ll see lots of input from the community).

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    • Composite out will definitely be on the final release – it’s a very important part of our aim to get this device into the hands of people who will be using old CRT TVs as their display device!

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    • Patience! Eben’s away in the US this week, but we’re planning on recording some more demos when he’s back. (It’s already working very nicely – I was just watching the trailer to the Star Trek reboot movie on it earlier today, and it was looking *sweet*.)

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  42. A little off-topic to the video, but since custom cases were mentioned I will still ask it: Will there be break-out pins for the leds (where applicable, i.e. power)?

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  45. Pingback: Raspberry Pi running Quake 3 | No more cubes.

  46. A combo wifi/bluetooth chip from CSR or TI would be much more useful than the Ethernet/USB hub. Plug it into the TV – use a Bluetooth mouse/keyboard and wifi gives Internet. These chips can be had for under $5.00 once you convince them to sell chips to you.

    You can get around FCC for a while by shipping the devices without software loaded. The end user loads it which violates FCC but the FCC is never going to come after individuals. When you get $10K pay for the testing to get the license.

    Meanwhile – to keep costs down you can get FCC/EU certified 11G wifi sticks in bulk from China for around $4.50. Order a lot of 1000 and then resell in combo with your CPU sticks. That will keep most people on the same wifi drivers.

    http://ogemray.en.alibaba.com/productgrouplist-200609573/Wifi_module.html

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    • Ethernet is absolutely necessary for most stationary purposes.
      this is not mobile device after all.

      If you want Bluetooth or wifi you can stick cheap tiny usb plugs for that function, however there are no inexpensive and still usable USB to Ethernet converters.

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  47. It’s better to use YouTube’s iframe method for embedding video as it allows both the Flash video player and the HTML5 video player to work as needed. I use YouTube’s HTML5 player myself.

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  48. Pingback: Raspberry Pi caught running Quake 3, classrooms will never be the same | Gadgets Magazine Philippines

  49. I did a Google search of the Broadcom BCM2835 and the only thing it turns up is your pages. Nothing from Broadcom. No data sheet. No specs. No nothing! That is not good. . .

    As noted by an earlier poster Broadcom is notorious for closed-source components. I realize the thing is only 25 buckaroos with HDMI. But prospective buyers need more detail as to Linux driver support, and you need this in your FAQs.

    I mean seriously. . . you and Eben say it runs Debian. But does it need a proprietary kernel to work? Does it run with the stock Debian kernel? Can it use a vanilla kernel from Kernel.org? If it cannot have a vanilla kernel compiled for it then users are stuck at whatever Broadcom gives them (which is probably already an older kernel). That will keep them stuck using an ancient distro (which may be the case soon anyway since the SoC is using armv6).

    What about other Linux distros? We do know that it will run Debian and probably Arch and Fedora. But we also know it will NOT run Meego, Ubuntu >= 9.10, and Android >= 2.2. So you need to make that clear to avoid giving people false hopes.

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    • It doesn’t need a proprietary kernel. If you read the FAQ more carefully, you’ll see that it runs with a vanilla Debian install. The other distros are also working with us; Ubuntu have decided not to participate because of the ARM issue, but everyone else has boards or has boards on the way to them, and will be supporting them.

      A bit less of the “I mean seriously…” stuff here, please. We’re working as hard as we can to get this board out to kids, to the developing world and to other people who can’t easily access computing. I don’t need your snark.

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        • Carefully read the page you linked to. Current Ubuntu (and other distros such as Meego and Anrdroid) only support ARMv7 architecture. The SoC on this board is ARMv5. That was my main point.

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      • Sorry if I my post seemed “snarky.” I certainly did not mean for it to appear too negative. You are doing good work. My apologies.

        I simply was disappointed about Eben’s comment above about “lack of ARMv7 would hurt you if you tried for one of the more recent versions (e.g. Icecream Sandwich).” That comment is somewhat misleading, as even Android 2.2 likely will not work due to lack of armv7. I was also disappointed in not finding anything about the SoC on Google. I hope that either you or Broadcom will be publishing hardware spec. sheet soon. Hobbyists and Linux enthusiasts will need that to fully utilize the board.

        My apologies also for missing the part in the FAQ about the vanilla kernel. That is GREAT! if it uses a vanilla kernel!

        I hope you will come out with future version supporting armv7 and SATA. I already have a Dockstar that has armv5. So I don’t have much use for this current board. But if you make one with armv7 and SATA I will buy many!

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        • No probs – it’s very nice of you to come back and clarify!

          Although Eben works for Broadcom (and they’re giving us some great support – we wouldn’t be able to have got the project this far without their generous help), we don’t have any power to ask them to open the GPU core or to get them to release data sheets – we’re a completely different entity, and our relationship with them is one of customer/supplier. We’d love to see it open too, but ultimately that sort of decision isn’t made by the engineers!

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          • I understand how things are. Thanks for more clarification.

            I was just re-reading your updated FAQs again and have two things to add:

            1) It says GPU driver “contains first stage bootloader.” Does that mean we cannot use a standard bootloader such as U-boot?

            2) The FAQ says “Will it run WINE (or Windows, or other x86 software)?
            No.”
            You should clarify that. Much of the x86 stuff should be able to run in an emulator such as DOSBox or Quemu. DOS version of Doom will even run under DOS box. There are even demos of Windows running on ARM devices!

  50. Is it a good idea to use Quake as the first software to demo the potential of a device wich is meant to teach children – a first person shooter ? Full Blood enabled ? Eventually, there are many other possibilities (fractals, povray, stellarium as mentioned above, a 3D car racing game (eg torcs, speed-dreams), a new special-version of !Lander … :) ) to demonstrate the power of this tool (!) in a way wich can’t be misinterpreted by the wider audience.

    Nevertheless – it’s impressive in its speed and size (1080p).

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    • We’ve used it because it’s a canonical demo used to demonstrate the capabilities of 3d chips in the industry, it’s recognisable to our audience, and it’s open source. The audience for the demos, the talks we’re giving, and the forums on this website isn’t really children; we expect kids to get interested in Raspi later on, when the device is put in front of them.

      I think there’s perhaps a philosophical difference here too; I’m not speaking for the trustees here, but personally, I have absolutely no problem with kids playing Quake; I am not at all interested in censoring what a kid can do with a computer. Frankly, I was making guns and swords out of sticks all the way through my childhood, and I appear to have turned out OK.

      Reply ↓

  52. Pingback: На крошечном Raspberry Pi запустили Quake III (видео) | Девайсы. Новости и обзоры компьютерной техники

  53. Does the CPU have an L2 cache? What kind of RAM is used, how much bandwidth is available?

    I have a bad feeling that the slow and outdated ARM11 CPU will be the sore point of the board.

    Reply ↓

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  58. The more I see of this product the greater it seems, cannot wait to get my hands on it. Any idea for an ETA as of yet? Keep up the great work btw.

    Reply ↓

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  67. I am also impressed with the work you have done so far. Would this be fast enough to play back videos of any reasonable quality? I am thinking maybe using this for a basic XBMC system?

    One other thing that I would be curious about is how well this would run with solar panels and will it be capable of standby mode and Wake-on-LAN? Certainly potential to be the big brother of the Arduino :)

    Reply ↓

    • We can play back 1080p30 H.264 high profile streams to level 4.1, so yes, I think it would make a pretty capable XBMC box. You should be able to sort something out with solar panels; our idle power consumption is so low that we’ve not really considered wake on LAN as a feature yet.

      Reply ↓

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  81. I read in the (provisional) specifications that a 10/100Mbps ethernet port is available. Is there a possibility that this will be a 10/100/1000Mbps port in the final product?

    Reply ↓

    • I’m afraid not. I don’t believe the chip being used supports 1000 and since the chip is linked to the Arm via USB2, you wouldn’t be able to use the bandwidth anyway.

      Reply ↓

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  84. I suppose the “few weeks time” gives you the opportunity to fix the frame rate so it’s even more awesome? Looking forward to seeing that! :)

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  93. Looks great! Cant wait to get my hands on this :)

    PS: Would it be possible to try to run Minecraft on this baby? I would really be interested to see if its playable. But I really don’t know how well Java and ARM are getting along.

    Reply ↓

    • At the moment, Minecraft won’t run – then again, if somebody wants to start working on a port…

      Minecraft, and other software cases, is discussed on our forums. It’d be good to see you there.

      Reply ↓

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  101. I’m interested in possibly making hardware add-ons for this.
    Can you confirm there isn’t a problem using the Raspberry Pi name – in the context of ‘x for raspberry pi’ – as long as it’s made very clear that I have no relationship with raspberry pi.
    Is there a list of add-ons you plan to do, so that competition can be avoided?
    Thanks.
    Ian Stirling.

    Reply ↓

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  103. I know your “out and about” and very busy at the mo but can we have a video Demo of this thing booting and going into a browser and maybe Youtube … please :O)

    Reply ↓

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  106. Im curious on the version of quake3 you used.
    Is this an original port based on vanilla quake 3? If its a original port would it be possible to share the source for use by other like myself to try on other devices?

    Do you know about existing ports?
    NanoGL: wrapper for OpenGL calls (works for q1/2/3): http://koti.mbnet.fi/hinkka/index.html
    My port to pandora years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW6CAD2UVek
    Ioquake3: http://ioquake3.org/2010/01/17/ioquake3-on-the-nokia-n900/
    Also runs on the pandora.

    As commented earlier based on experience with the pandora, I do not expect that the floating point is the bottleneck but the gpu.

    Reply ↓

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  109. I am S.P.E.E.C.H.L.E.S.S! Even my Laptop couldn’t outrun that little thing. I can already see things that I’m going to to rip apart.
    Can’t wait…!!!
    Definitely going to subscribe to the Mailing List.

    Reply ↓

  110. Pingback: Minicomputer für 25$ – Raspberry Pi | gadgetSpy

  111. Could this fulfill my dream of a cheap, diskless, fanless device that I can build into a MythTV frontend?

    I’m willing to NFS mount for media, most of the OS. I might even boot over ethernet, and keep the entire kernel and filesystem on the MythTV backend host server.

    Reply ↓

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  116. The composite video is a nice touch as it will open up the ability for people to use it as almost a frankensteins laptop with a car AV monitor. Cant instantly think of specific applications where that would be handy as its late and I’m tired lol.

    But I am sure theres many field applications where something that can practically run on static electricity from your jumper but from time to time will need an easily transportable VDU that works from a DC battery would be an ideal solution like maybe storing remote weather station data or other forms of headless data acquisition

    Reply ↓

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  120. Was this the normal open-source Q3 or was it based on ioquake3? Just curious if both were tried to see which one gets better performance…

    Reply ↓

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