Half-Life 2 running natively on HaikuOS
215 points - today at 12:53 PM
Sourcesmallstepforman
today at 6:26 PM
X512 is an amazing treasure in the Haiku community. Other than nVidia hardware accelerated drivers, he ported Haiku to RiscV, got sound through HDMI and DisplayPort working, he got AMD Vulkan drivers for Southern Islands chipsets also working, made break throughs in dozens of other porting projects, he’s an amazing Hacker par excellance virtually unknown outside the Haiku community.
Looks like this may have been based on the nillerusr Source engine, which is based on a 2020 leak of the Source sources. nillerusr's engine has also been used to port some Valve games to Android.
MisterTea
today at 6:02 PM
I wish Valve would take a cue from id and release the source code to Source and/or at least GoldSrc under an open license. Though I have a hard time imagining them opening up code to more lucrative games like Team Fortress Classic or Counter-Strike classic. Nice dream though...
lunar_rover
today at 6:12 PM
Source uses licenced middleware such as Havok so SDKs are likely all we're going to get officially. Source 2 might be a different story if HL3 releases one day since Valve replaced audio and physics with in-house technologies.
charcircuit
today at 6:56 PM
Why should Valve give up their leverage. They actively pick and choose who they license the engine to.
tweetle_beetle
today at 7:56 PM
Realistically there isn't really any commercial value left in it though. While there were some notable unique games made with it (Titanfall 1 & 2, E.Y.E, The Stanley Parable, etc), these were made over a decade ago and the majority of games made with it are reworks/mods/adaptations of Half-Life related material.
https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/List_of_third-party...
Nifty to see... I always liked BeOS/Haiku from a tech perspective, but really don't care nearly as much for the UX or ergonomics... I really like a lot of the Windows 10 start menu and taskbar, but I do hate the MS search results/ads,etc so I switched to Linux for non-work and mostly Cosmic since later alphas.
The UX has always been my favorite part. It's like some mixup of OS/2 and Classic Mac OS
I think HL2 on portable 5W ARM linux is more interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fl1nrDvmiII
I wanted to say, 5 watts, doesn't HL2 already run on Raspberry Pi? But then I realized, this thing seems to be powered by some kind of rpi?
https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/uconsole-kit-rpi-cm...
That's pretty cool though, do you have a video of it running on the device itself?
This is captured on the device with ffmpeg, but mobile phone video no.
I know it's not as cool but the Steam Deck can run HL2 at just as low power consumption with its AMD APU.
"A normal Steam Deck consumes about 4 to 7 watts of total system power when idling on the home screen with low screen brightness."
Maybe HL2 brings zero overhead to idle then?
Anyway X86 is the past, risc-v is so completely lost into eternal future... only ARM really works right now.
looking forward to see Action Retro's shenanigans on YouTube with this.
I've watched his previous videos on Haiku and haven't been impressed with him. He doesn't seem to have in-depth knowledge of how software and drivers work, which is especially important given how work-in-progress it all is, and that the lineage of Haiku goes back to BeOS. The community has done a lot of good work, and he doesn't grasp it fully.
kaladin-jasnah
today at 5:51 PM
> He doesn't seem to have in-depth knowledge of how software and drivers work
I don't really think the point of his videos is to go into that level of detail. I think I'm someone who could understand that level of detail but I still watch his videos anyway since they're fun and engaging (same with others like Michael MJD), and have other YouTube channels that I might watch for more technical dives.
It's genuinely possible to do informative, fun and engaging videos on a niche OS; it does require a lot of skill and effort to pull off he does not have. His content has been way too shallow. There's a lot more to an OS than just the Desktop Environment being different, and 'Can it run Minecraft' (with missing/broken drivers he doesn't understand).
Apocryphon
today at 8:33 PM
Perhaps it’s too much of a reoccurring gimmick but his videos are squarely in the “tech-aware consumer” user profile, not a pro developer or editor. It’s like how LGR does retrospectives and deep-dives on hardware from a purely hobbyist-enthusiast customer perspective.
prmoustache
today at 4:03 PM
Yes, you have seen a video and you have seen them all. It can be resumed to "will it run minecrafts (or one of its clones)".
I guess he figured out the short 10-15min format is better for engagement bevause people brains have been destroyed by tiktok and instagram reels and barely anyone can concentrate for 30min on a subject but really it makes for very uninformative vids.
Hats off to the folks behind this for keeping such a cool project alive! This, ReactOS, and TempleOS have been my answer to the question of: "what should I install if I'm looking for something interesting?" for at least a decade. Obviously for vastly different reasons.
limsungkee
today at 4:52 PM
Dang. Half-Life 2 ruled my high school life. it is still insane.
MomsAVoxell
today at 4:47 PM
This is great, but can we get a port to BeBox please. ;)
AshamedCaptain
today at 4:36 PM
What I find depressing is because of idiotic Linux policies, it turns out nvidia hardware is easier to run on a 3rd party OS than hardware with otherwise fully open source drivers like Radeon.
This is just yet another example that you may think things in the hardware world have changed now that Linux "rules", but they have not.
cherryteastain
today at 6:27 PM
What do you mean? BSDs have tons of code lifted from the Linux amdgpu driver.
AshamedCaptain
today at 8:41 PM
They are literally the only one who has managed to do it,, and they do so by having a huge layer of compatibility that makes it take years for it to support a specific generation. We do not know if it would be easier for bad to support nvidia.. because they already have nvidia drivers too (by nvidia itself).
On the other hand here we have a random guy that adds support for nvidia gpus, by himself, on a non-linux, non-bsd operating system. And specifically claims he is not trying to do the radeon one because he finds it too much work.
tadfisher
today at 4:53 PM
Are you talking about driver ABIs or something else?
Quitschquat
today at 6:01 PM
What makes it easier?
parisiansam
today at 4:21 PM
i wonder how many people are using haikuos enough to make frontpage of video game on that os ?
When people get doom running on a toaster, do you also ask how many people game on a toaster? It's more about the technical challenge of the whole deal.
InsideOutSanta
today at 5:00 PM
I wonder how many people are flying to space in rockets for rocket launches to make the frontpage? It's just interesting. Haiku is cool, and getting relatively complex games to run on it is a good signal that it is making progress.
I love it, this is OG hacker news
ErroneousBosh
today at 6:32 PM
.o/
But then what did you expect?
paisawalla
today at 6:30 PM
Add in the number of people who have fond memories of BeOS