How to Play Half-Life, Quake and More on a Raspberry Pi 4 with PiKISS

When we say that the Raspberry Pi can give a lot of play, it is for something. This small device has more than proven itself to be a great option if you are looking to emulate retro consoles, but also to run great PC video game classics like Half-Life at a speed of 70 fps.

Raspberry Pi, a device suitable for gaming

Play Half-Life, Quake and More on a Raspberry Pi 4 with PiKISS

The Raspberry Pi needs no introduction at this point. And this popular development board has been giving a lot to talk about for years and years. It has been used for all kinds of maker projects ranging from home automation installations, to NAS servers or retro console emulation systems. So we all have more or less clear what it can be worth.

However, with the arrival of the Raspberry Pi 4, its power level capabilities have been improved and that opens the doors to new uses. Or rather, to options that were not possible before due to this lack of performance. One of them, having the possibility of playing Half-Life with a rate of 70 frames per second.

Half-Life is one of the great PC classics and one of the best games for millions of players around the world. And yes, it is true that this is the first installment, which was released in 1998, but that does not detract from the mainly graphic capabilities that the latest Raspberry Pi model has obtained.

How to install Half-Life on the Raspberry Pi 4

Now that you are possibly even more drawn to this little development board, how do you install Half-Life on the Raspberry Pi 4? Well, the answer is very simple, through PiKISS . This utility, compatible with Debian-based operating systems for Raspberry Pi, not only allows you to run this game, it also gives access to others that have been optimized for this new hardware as well as more tools.

The PiKISS installation process is as simple as running a simple terminal command, but first you must make sure you have an internet connection. Once you have turned on your Raspberry Pi 4 and are connected, open the Terminal application and execute the following command:

curl -sSL https://git.io/JfAPE | bash

Ready, now that you have the PiKISS application installed, you just have to open it and you will see how a new window appears that gives the option to install different types of applications and utilities for your Raspberry Pi. For example, as you can see in the screenshot, there is all this.

  • Tweaks to push your distribution to the limit
  • Games to install the available ones or compile others easily
  • Emulation installs different emulators
  • Info related information about the Raspberry Pi or related
  • Multimedia installation of apps like XBMC
  • Configure
  • Internet internet related improvements
  • Server to use the Raspberry Pi and its distribution as a server
  • Devs tools to develop your own applications
  • Others scripts with various purposes
  • Exit

The option that interests you here is the Games option , so that’s the one you must select. When you log in, you will see that there is a wide variety of titles that you can install and not just Half-Life. There are games like Descent, Duke Nukem 3D, Diablo and Diablo 2, etc.

Once you have selected the game you want, you just have to press Enter and you will go to a new window where you will be told how to proceed with its installation. Something as simple as pressing Enter again and waiting for everything to finish. Of course, before finishing the installation they will ask you whether or not you have a copy of the original. Respond and the process will end. Ready, you can play now.

As you can see, having the option to play titles like these on a Raspberry Pi is great and the fluidity that is achieved is so good that together with a good Raspberry Pi case like the ones we showed you a long time ago you will have the perfect device to carry. always with you.