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raytopia

I've had this idea for a while now but what if someone built a game console based on the Pi hardware?

I know lots of people use their pi's for retro gaming but I'd really like to see some new games made for the hardware.

Does anyone know if there's a group working on this or would be interested in creating one?

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It would likely be similar to gaming on Linux but with the limitations of ARM-only and OpenGL ES 3.1 or Vulkan 1.2. [1]

What would be more interesting is an open source micro-kernel and gaming SDK targeting Raspberry Pi.

1. See https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_Linux_ARM_games

I think it could avoid some of the issues with gaming on linux because you could focus in on a unified platform and if there was a gaming SDK targeting the pi we might see orginal games being made as opposed to just ports.

Also what exactly would a micro-kernel entail? I'm much more familiar with game development than os development.

Most Raspberry Pi Linux distros take around 10 seconds to boot. It can be made faster by using a tiny distribution or something like https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/ but it would be nice to find an OS geared towards gaming.

> OpenGL ES 3.1 or Vulkan 1.2.

Weird that it doesn't have the full OpenGL, even if it was through Zink.

You can run PICO-8 on a Raspberry Pi today. Still a "retro" feel, but they are all new games being written for the platform. https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=3085

PICO-8 is awesome! But I'm thinking of something that moves into a more real console category.

It's a really nice idea, I've had similar thoughts myself, but sadly (and strangely) I actually think the Pi is too powerful. PICO-8 and similar works so well because the limitations are severe, 3D is a massive technical achievement on those systems, whereas the RPI can run Minecraft (to my knowledge) without too much issue. It puts it in this odd space where it can do too much to bring game development back to a simpler time, but not enough to make it an actual market.

Aside from that, it'd suffer from all the same problems as PC gaming does; different monitors to account for, no standard input method, varying specs between models, etc...

I could see it working, it's just got more issues to account for than other fantasy consoles

The Pi is probably too powerful for the hobbiest game market just like your saying. I think the Playdate also somewhat fills that niche but maybe the Pi could be something in between the two extremes of modern consoles power and the 8bit fantasy consoles.

For it to work and avoid the issues with PCs it'd need a unified controller, sdk, and a single model that games would be made for.

You're a 100% corect though it'd be a lot harder to make games for compared to fantasy consoles.

I've made a github page if anyone wants to collaborate on this idea.

https://www.github.com/raytopianprojects/gamedev-pie

I feel like the GPU on the Pi is pretty weak. It was fine in the first model, but they haven't improved it much in subsequent versions compared to the CPU.

It is pretty weak but that might be a plus because it sets the ceiling for what can be made and would somewhat prevent the insanely long dev cycles we have today.

Same could be said for the cpu, but that has seen big jumps in performance.

Faster cpu enables 'heavier' applications, some of which also involves more graphics work. And there's also gpu compute (tbh, dunno if that's even a thing on RPi's?).

A useful general-purpose computing device has a practical ratio for cpu, ram, graphics & storage options. Gpu is definitely the part that's lagging on latest RPi iterations.

The Pi is an ARM chip on a board with I/O for HDMI etc. There are plenty of ARM game consoles including the Nintendo Switch

The hardware is definitely capable of becoming a console. It just needs a community making games for it.

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