OpenArena is a free and open source first person shooter game made by the community. It looks similar and have identical game play as Quake III Arena. OpenArena started as a project in 2005. In this tutorial you will learn how to install it on PocketC.H.I.P.

Beware that the performance of this version the game on PocketC.H.I.P. is not good and you might be disappointed. Have a look at the video for details and subscribe to my YouTube channel for more videos and tutorials.

Step 1: Getting Ready

OpenArena is a first person shooter (FPS) therefore for optimal control I need to plug USB mouse in PocketC.H.I.P. I also need a headset for the sound.

Step 2: Installing OpenArena

Connect PocketC.H.I.P. to a WiFi, open a terminal and execute the following commands to install OpenArena and to update its configuration file:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openarena -y
mv ~/.openarena/baseoa/q3config.cfg ~/.openarena/baseoa/q3config.cfg.backup
wget -O ~/.openarena/baseoa/q3config.cfg http://bit.ly/29NCtfb

Step 3: Playing OpenArena

Type the following command to launch OpenArena on PocketC.H.I.P.:

openarena

If you are using my configurations the game will be launched in full screen using the the smallest standard screen resolution. Although I have configured graphics and sound effects almost to the bare minimum, the game still runs very very slowly.

In my opinion the performance of OpenArena on PocketC.H.I.P. could be improved with the proper EGL drivers and by recompiling the game from scratch. I have seen videos of it and another version of Quake 3 working far better on Orange Pi and Odroid boards. Both Orange Pi and C.H.I.P have Allwinner ARM CPU and Mali GPU.

PocketC.H.I.P. comes with mainline Linux kernel and there is a GPU driver issue with the hardware acceleration of Mali. In this particular case, probably OpenArena and Quake 3 will work better on image with Linux-sunxi version 3.4 of the kernel and its Mali drivers.