So little power. So much game.

[Anoobis]

The Lords of Midnight and its sequel, Doomdark's Revenge. They're both titanic strategy games that were originally made for the ZX Spectrum in the mid 80s. The updated versions take up a combined 55 MB, and are available for free.

 

[FateLanegod]

I do taken some stuff as recommendations but generally just having people think what great games they love that actually require next to nothing from their rigs or are compatible with their poverty oldie or laptop.

Yeah, actually, trying to run something fancy on top of legacy PC in Linux is just a fun game by itself

So this is definitely not a general game recommendation thread. Would be nice to see what relatively modern title people had managed to play on aged hardware.

I have Core i5 ULV 2.5Ghz/Intel HD Graphics 4000/Linux. I play Clone Hero on it in 1080p with all effects enabled. It is Unity, but surprisingly not very demanding. When turning on video or animated backgrounds, had to downscale to 720p, cause framerate sometimes drops.

On this mobile chips you should set CPU frequency ‘performance’ governor via linux-cpupower and put Energy Performance Bias to maximum during gameplay to have reserved overclocking unlocked. In order this to work, make sure there are no conservative “powersaving” features turned on somewhere in BIOS. There also gamemode-tools available for this, but I found executing simple script is more reliable.

And one more thing, I have discovered that a good power source is a must. If your charger is pretty old or broken or you have low voltage in your socket or disruptions in electricity supply, the laptop might automatically switch to energy saving throttling hardware mode (like when there is low battery level), and only turning off and on could bring it back to max speed.

As well, additional cooling is not only for high end systems. These oldies throttle down to snail’s speed when overheated. Not much of a problem in winter, just consider it as generic advise.

 

[Sumea]

Yeah, actually, trying to run something fancy on top of legacy PC in Linux is just a fun game by itself

So this is definitely not a general game recommendation thread. Would be nice to see what relatively modern title people had managed to play on aged hardware.

I have Core i5 ULV 2.5Ghz/Intel HD Graphics 4000/Linux. I play Clone Hero on it in 1080p with all effects enabled. It is Unity, but surprisingly not very demanding. When turning on video or animated backgrounds, had to downscale to 720p, cause framerate sometimes drops.

On this mobile chips you should set CPU frequency ‘performance’ governor via linux-cpupower and put Energy Performance Bias to maximum during gameplay to have reserved overclocking unlocked. In order this to work, make sure there are no conservative “powersaving” features turned on somewhere in BIOS. There also gamemode-tools available for this, but I found executing simple script is more reliable.

And one more thing, I have discovered that a good power source is a must. If your charger is pretty old or broken or you have low voltage in your socket or disruptions in electricity supply, the laptop might automatically switch to energy saving throttling hardware mode (like when there is low battery level), and only turning off and on could bring it back to max speed.

As well, additional cooling is not only for high end systems. These oldies throttle down to snail’s speed when overheated. Not much of a problem in winter, just consider it as generic advise.

For me; I found out that the situation currently is that Vulkan driver is buggy, or feature incomplete, or something like that. For example, flycast crashing under vulkan, and testing that the performance issues with Buckshot Roulette are highly alleviated by forcing it to visually glitchy opengl3 mode, so, it is not an enjoyable play either way and got the uninstall. Most proton run games work fine but may have also visual glitches or possible performance impact if proton uses vulkan, like with DXVK. There is a possibility the drivers will be fixed but I am not holding breath for EOL product to get that treatment unless Linux community has source code and ability to do it without intel. Which a recent update would say, they could but it also could be a hardware limitation.

As goes for modern games, I could be a funny guy and say Nekopara 4 counts as moderately modern but instead I did install Disco Elysium, and... Yeah, I gotta give it a pretty retro resolution and graphic settings and also be OK with pretty retro frame rate of 30 but it is playable, it is Disco Elysium after all that does not require it. I also got OneShot native linux version working after having to mess about with the .so files the game ships with and yeets the game into crashing on startup until you find right combo of discards and keepers. But it is a 2016 game... a 2016 RPG maker game for sure but just the absurdity of making older linux native games work makes one appreciate the backwards compatibility that windows and it's software standards have. Oh yeah same shit exponentially worse trying to get UT2004, native version running. But I did do it and epic did release official 64bit linux binary version at some point. Add in community run master server and is still alive.

And yeah, I did give some stuff to my setup with auto-cpufreq and TLP as I feel those skirt around my buggy ACPI somewhat well, even if they should not be together and all that. In the lineup of possible SOC's my laptop could have shipped with, it is actually the first capable of turbo boosting and with UHD instead of HD graphics chip as well. So that tip is something I could have used but figured out myself already. Not sure did I break my KDE desktop's ability to influence the power mode if it even would have worked at all with the buggy ACPI.