Can I play games on uConsole R-01?

The biggest hurdle I’m having with my R01 uConsole is finding software built to run on riscv64. This is my first RISC-V device and I haven’t found any games that can run on this device. I would love to try Genesis or Gameboy games, homebrew platformers, or anything like that, but I don’t know if that’s feasible on this architecture. Any hints or recommendations? Thanks.

1 Like

lighter weight games should be possible. I have a Sipeed LicheeRV which uses the same chip as the R-01 (Allwinner D1). The graphics are slow on it, it lacks GPU acceleration that is usable by any open source games (no OpenGL, GLES, or Vulkan). For text-based games like Nethack/Angband/Moria it worked fine for me. A console emulator that doesn’t need GL for any display effects ought to work, but you’ll have to hunt around for one and build it yourself.

I feel like the R-01 is a pretty advanced choice. Most people will want to setup some kind of cross compile environment and start building your own software for it. That can be as brute force as putting QEMU on your desktop system. Running a vanilla Debian riscv image on it that has a similar glibc as the clockwork pi image will be good enough for generating compatible binaries.

Another option, if you are not satisfied with diving into Debian-on-QEMU. Would be investigating a packaging and build system like NixOS and adding that on top of the Clockwork Pi R-01 image, and hopefully leverage someone’s binary cache to make it easier to pick up build dependencies when building your own packages. See also GitHub - chuangzhu/nixos-sun20iw1p1: NixOS on Allwinner D1 RISC-V

1 Like

I have it. no. There isn’t really isnt graphics, its only okay to like check something, for example a map or read a pdf. If you are not comfortable with the command-line this is not the option . it’s better to stick with command-line games.