ExaGear and Steam Games

Since Exagear lets me run X86 applications, the first X86 application I installed was Steam so I could try out some of the lower requirement games to see how they handle on the Pi.

Installing Steam

Because exagear uses a x86 image, you need to modify the apt sources once you’ve installed ExaGear and started the ExaGear ‘guest’.

$ exagear
Starting /bin/bash in the guest image /opt/exagear/images/debian-8
$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list


You’ll see the default entries for Debian

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian jessie main


The non-free and contrib repositories need to be added to the end so the line should look like this –

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian jessie main non-free contrib


After updating the sources.list file, an apt-get update will need to be done so that Steam can be installed.
While the update is going, you may notice that the repositories

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get -y install steam


Playing Games!!

I’ve installed the Linux version of Steam for these tests. Big picture doesn’t work and just crashes XFCE.
For my games testing, I’ve disabled the Steam overlay in case it affects compatibility. I’ve also removed pulseaudio from my installation

Games so far that I’ve tried
Counterstrike 1.6 works, gets between 5-20 FPS on most maps.

Half-Life works, again gets between 5-20 FPS.

Probably a safe assumption that any Half-Life engined game will work.

Osmos works, performance is pretty good, however I did get some screen flickers when I was playing.

Papers Please works, performance is good, but again I got some screen flickering when playing.

Now, for the games that didn’t quite work –

• Cities in motion starts up, but then crashes after language selection
• Nation Red starts up, but then crashes
• Cogs starts up, but then crashes after the first logo
• Prison Architect doesn’t start properly at all, even in Safe mode.
• FTL starts up briefly, but then actually crashes the DM and boots me back to the login screen.

And games that didn’t start at all…

• Race The Sun
• Uplink
• Solar 2
• SpaceChem
• TIS-100
• Bridge Constructor Playground

As I try more games, I’ll write more posts as to game compatability.