Modern PC gaming may not be the most energy efficient hobby. Even as someone who would sooner play yesteryear’s favourite over this month’s shiniest new game, I dread to think just how much smaller my electricity bill might be if it wasn’t for my gaming rig. Thankfully for retro gaming fiends, energy efficient hardware isn’t hard to come by.
Case in point, hardware creator Alejandro Villegas Alonso shared a clip of classic Tomb Raider running from a low-power chip. The SoC in question is the ESP32-P4 microcontroller, a lightweight 32-bit RISC-V processor featuring two 400 MHz cores which sips a mere 1 watt of energy according to the data sheet (via Tom’s Hardware).
It’s not the kind of chip that would usually be used for anything like gaming, rather more for simple tasks in embedded devices such as cameras—that makes it all the more impressive that Alonso has got Tomb Raider up and running on it. It’s particularly appealing given you can pick one of these up for very little cash.
The chip is running a port of OpenLara, a version of the original Tomb Raider that can be played in your browser with unlocked FPS. This version recreates the classic game in an open source engine so, no, this isn’t a teeny tiny original PlayStation emulator or anything like that. Alejandro Villegas Alonso explains via the project’s GitHub that this port “runs the classic Tomb Raider 1 engine with software rendering, audio, and USB HID keyboard input on Espressif’s latest RISC-V SoC.”
The project uses the ESP32-P4-Function-EV-Board specifically, which comes with both a seven-inch capacitive touch screen and even a camera module. This obviously pushes the project’s total power budget a little higher than 1W, with the power use of even just the 1024 x 600 LCD screen quickly overshadowing what’s being used by the chip at this board’s heart.
Alonso writes that their Tomb Raider port features a “software RGB565 renderer at 320 x 240, hardware-scaled to 1024 x 600 via the […] Pixel Processing Accelerator.” As Croft crunches through snow in the YouTube short, you can hear stereo audio via an ES8311 codec. Game inputs are handled via a USB keyboard, though that feels borderline profane to a console interloper like me.
With some versions of this development board costing a little under $30, it’s not hard to see why ESP32 microcontrollers are such a popular choice for DIY hardware projects. Recently, we’ve seen similar SoCs used in a credit card sized computer, the ‘world’s worst USB drive‘, plus this pocket-sized Game Boy emulator based on an ereader. Creativity knows no bounds, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw a few more retro gamers begin to bring yesteryear’s favourites back to life on similarly low-power hardware.
