Compiling and Running Half-Life 2 on a Raspberry Pi

In this video, we will be showing you how you can compile and run Half-Life 2 on your Raspberry Pi.

Tutorial: https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-h...

For this tutorial on running Half-Life 2 on our Pi, we used the following equipment. Please note that we do receive a small commission when making purchases through these Amazon links.

Raspberry Pi: https://amzn.to/3WUT8Ij
Micro SD Card: https://amzn.to/3US0ZUz
Ethernet Cable: https://amzn.to/3K8BcT7

A few years back, running any serious game would have been seen as something that was basically impossible for the Raspberry Pi. But as newer releases have come out, the processing power has finally gotten to the point where games like Half-Life 2 can actually be somewhat playable.

To get Half-Life 2 to run on a Raspberry Pi, we will be having to make use of a leaked version of the source engine that is available on GitHub. Using this leaked version, we will be able to compile Half-Life 2 for the ARM architecture that our Raspberry Pi utilizes. The advantage of compiling it rather than using an emulator like Box64 is that native code is always going to run significantly faster.

Now there are a couple of things you will require to be able to run this game on your Pi. First off you will want to be running at least a Raspberry Pi 4. However, for actual playable performance we recommend a Raspberry Pi 5 4GB or better.

Secondly, you must own the game on Steam and have access to your account. We will be using your account in this tutorial to download the actual game files.

Third, you will want to be running a 64-bit operating system. In our case, we are using Raspberry Pi OS Desktop Bookworm, but these same steps should also work on Ubuntu.