CRPG fun on the Pi
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I've had a Pi 3 now for a few weeks, purchased for use with RetroPie (great job BTW), and I have been playing around with the emulators and a few roms.
Well I was doing that until I decided to try to get my Might and Magic games from GOG running on DOSBOX, and now I'm probably 30 hours into World of XEEN, exploring the Darkside. I had envisioned using the Pi for arcade style game, but after this I can see myself loading up on plenty of 80s-90s dungeon crawlers and killing me some goblins.
Anyone else interested in these kind of title? What are you playing, and what have you played?
Any recommendations?
I am a little gutted to have encountered a rather nasty bug in Baldur's Gate, so had to abandon my playthrough of that, but I have the other Infinity Engine games to test out already.
Cheers
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80's dungeon crawlers were a bit before my time, however I recently got The Elder Scrolls: Arena working through DosBox on my Pi3. I used to play that one as a kid and it works quite well on a Pi3. I was mostly in the Duke Nukem 3D and Quake crowd back then but I immensely enjoyed Arena. Never actually had the pleasure of playing Daggerfall until recently when Bethesda released it, and I simply can't get into it because I have no nostalgia for that title, even though I'm sure I would have enjoyed it back then. I've heard of some of the games you mention, but never played. If you like dungeon crawlers you should like Arena and Daggerfall. You can get them from the Bethesda website free of charge.
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Oh excellent, I wasn't sure if Arena would run on the Pi, I thought it might be too slow. Good to hear.
I like the Elder Scrolls games, all of them,but Morrowind is my favourite. Arena I've only dabbled in, so I will finish it this time through.
I was a big fan of fps games like you mentioned, but cut my teeth on Baldur's Gate and the like.
I actually became more interested in these sorts of dungeon crawlers after spending a number of years playing Atlus rpgs like Shin Megami Tensei and Etrian Odyssey.
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Yeah if you want great framerates you pan push the CPU to 1350 MHz usually pretty safely if you have adequate cooling. I did have this running on a Pi2 with playable framerates at 1000 MHz. The game became far more enjoyable on the Pi3 though with the enhanced architecture and a 1200 MHz clock speed. I briefly tested daggerfall and it was playable on the Pi3 as well. You will need dynamic recompilation enabled in DosBox to get playable performance. In most newer releases of RetroPie this is enabled by default when you install from binary.
Yeah pretty much the only RGP I played as a kid outside of the Zelda series was Arena. I missed Daggerfall entirely and picked up the series again with Morrowind, however there were a few things that killed the Morrowind experience for me. First you could kill quest critical NPC's without realizing it and have to load your game. Secondly I found the visuals muddy, dusty and unappealing. The lack of ragdoll physics so characters just had all the same death animations didn't help either. I really started enjoying the series again with Oblivion.
In Morrowind I remember messing with the character stats to insane degrees so I could jump like 500 feet in the air and shatter an opponents shield in one strike, that was kind of fun lol. I think modifying character stats through the console and seeing what happens was the most enjoyment I got from Morrowind.
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I got Arena up and running today, but couldn't get Daggerfall going due to being a noob. I was trying to follow instructions for the installation but firstly it wouldn't let me install it with Huge chosen due to lack of harddrive space, even though I had more than enough, and then I couldn't figure out how to mount the drive as a Cd drive for the game to run.
I will have to give it another go and do some more reading.
Morrowind is king for me due to the perfect balance between giving you enough information to achieve what you want, while not treating you like you're stupid. Earlier rpgs rarely tell you what you need to know without guides or hint books,and later rpgs basically do everything for you to the extent where it almost plays itself.
The sheer quantity of high quality quests on offer, the personality of the map, the fixed level areas, amazing enchantments, etc, just make it the most compelling for me. I went from being a dagger wielding muppet to a flying beast raining fireballs over city walls.
Other than that, I got the Eye of the Beholder series and Dungeon Hack up and running too, and some of the other Might and Magic games for when I can finished Xeen.
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@thejewk I think for Daggerfall I got it up and running on a PC implementation of DosBox first, then several months later just dropped the files onto my Pi3 and away I went lol. I do know the initial setup had a few hoops to jump through, but that was many months ago so I don't remember the steps. I believe Bethesda has some well written instructions for the process.
I do agree with you that the modern iterations of the Elder Scrolls series do tend to spoon feed the player quite a bit. I've actually taken note of that several times since Oblivion. On the other hand I found myself wondering around aimlessly in Morrowind quite a bit until I turned it off so I can understand what they were doing, but I think they certainly took it a bit too far. Even the puzzles in the more recent iterations are pathetic. So yeah they went from one extreme to the other in my opinion.
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That's a bloody good idea. I'll try that myself with Daggerfall. Thanks!
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@thejewk No problem. Glad I could help.
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I don't really mean to hijack the thread here, but how hard is it to get DosBox setup on RetroPie? I looked at the wiki about it, but it looks really confusing. There are a number of games I'd like to try to get running, but don't know what all would be involved. Also, is DosBox limited to just old DOS games, or can it run some newer stuff? I ask because I thought Balder's Gate was a Windows program, yet it's mentioned in this thread that it is running in DosBox. I have 1 & 2, as well as Neverwinter Knights and Diablo 1 & 2 that I'd love to play again. I'd also like to get games like Warcraft and StarCraft running (I know there are ports available, might have to go that way). And I'd absolutely die if I could get games like the Jedi Knight series and Knights of the Old Republic running.
Who's Scruffy Looking?
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The Infinity Engine games run on GemRB which you can install from the Experimental packages menu.
As for Dosbox, it depends on the game for how difficult it is to get running. For many of them it's as simple as copying the game folder to the roms/pc path. You can then browse to the exe file in Emulationstation and run it like any other game.
Most of the games I have played about with are games I already own on various collections on CD or from Gog.com. I install them on a Windows Pc and then copy the installed folder across.
Some are a lot more complicated, and some need tinkering with to get going correctly. Daggerfall is still giving me a headache.
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@hansolo77 Dosbox is limited to old Dos programs, as the goal of the program is to emulate an ideal Dos only machine. Saying that I have actually got Windows 3.1 running very nicely on my pi3 through dosbox. So depending on the windows version the game you mention runs on, it may work just fine. Windows 3.1 runs faster on the Pi3 through Dosbox than on any physical hardware of the time I found. I doubt this has any real level of accuracy but a benchmarking tool packaged with the game "Outpost" detected the CPU as a 250 Mhz 486. I found that quite amusing because the 486 never went much beyond 100 Mhz.
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I should also state that while I haven't personally tested it, Windows 95 should run through Dosbox as well, and by extension Windows 98 may run also since it's so similar to 95 and runs on top or Dos.
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Yeah I think the games I'm looking to run would probably be more for WindowsXP. No biggie though, thanks for the info!
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I presume you'd need a keyboard for most of the DOS titles. I wonder if someone has put together a good collection of more RetroPie/controller DOS titles.
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AMA
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@hooperre what? :)
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@hansolo77 oh shit sorry in my drunken attempt to be funny my picture didn’t post. ashamed face
NWN is probably my favorite game of all time. I grabbed the demo of ExaGear tonight and installed Wine. It crashed during installation and I’m a Linux newbie so I don’t think all the drivers installed correctly because DXBall and Age of Empires didn’t run but miraculously NWN did! It is honestly running better than it did when I first played it in 2000, but that’s not saying much. The frame rate is pretty poor with the lowest settings but it’s playable if you’re like... really trying to play it. I feel comfortable just knowing I have something reliable to run it no matter the platform or updates to Windows going forward. Used the GOG install. Haven’t patched or anything. Anyway, just remembered this thread and thought you might care to know. Non-OC’d.
I’ll be testing more later.
Edit: I’m shit at posting on mobile!
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That's awesome. I saw a post about the ExaGear addon in a Facebook group post. I was interested but don't really like the idea that it only works for a couple of days then you have to BUY it. This is meant to be all open source and free. That guy is just stealing other people's work and made a simple installer to streamline it, then took the credit for it. If I could figure out what all is required, installing WINE directly (without a 3rd party OS (ExaGear) that's the best. I'll have to spend some time researching it when I have the time to spare. Good job getting NWN installed though. That game was awesome and I never really got far into it. Too bad the framerate is so bad it's unplayable.
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@hansolo77 Well that's a disappointment. ExaGear does kind of just cause a few headaches in terms of being unable to update to the most recent version of Wine. I'm finding that a lot of things that are on the AppDB as running well are not working with ExaGear. Age of Empires, for example, isn't running even though it's 'platinum' on wine's AppDB page.
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