Release Xash3D - Half Life


I'm trying to play this on my CC pandora and it keeps crashing on the intro train ride, or just upon arrival. The SD card LED flashes heavily, the sound starts to stutter, and the frame rate drops to more-or-less nothing (it says "spf 6"). I can still access the menu and quit. I've tried dropping the CPU speed (I started on 800 MHz but tried at 500) and also changed my SGX driver to an 3.X one, but neither seems to help. I've not been using my pandora much for years but have fully updated it to 1.76 and have run an "incremental update" since then. I got the game files by installing HL under wine on Linux using my original CD, and then downloaded and ran the update (also in wine). Could it be because of my rubbish SD card? It's a transcend class 10. dmesg does not show any errors after exiting. Any suggestions appreciated - really keen to play through this on my pandora!
 
I'm trying to play this on my CC pandora and it keeps crashing on the intro train ride, or just upon arrival. The SD card LED flashes heavily, the sound starts to stutter, and the frame rate drops to more-or-less nothing (it says "spf 6"). I can still access the menu and quit. I've tried dropping the CPU speed (I started on 800 MHz but tried at 500) and also changed my SGX driver to an 3.X one, but neither seems to help. I've not been using my pandora much for years but have fully updated it to 1.76 and have run an "incremental update" since then. I got the game files by installing HL under wine on Linux using my original CD, and then downloaded and ran the update (also in wine). Could it be because of my rubbish SD card? It's a transcend class 10. dmesg does not show any errors after exiting. Any suggestions appreciated - really keen to play through this on my pandora!
It's likely an issue with System RAM, CC unit only has 256MBs of RAM. You may get around the issue by enabling a swap file to fake it into thinking it has more RAM, but likely performance will not be as good as Rebirth or 1GHZ with the 512MB of RAM. This utility makes it easy to make them and enable them. https://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=swaptools-0.1-slaeshjag
 
Thanks for the reply. I did wonder if I should add a swap file. I used one previously, though it eventually killed my SD card and I lost a lot of stuff. I could use a second SD card for swap, to prevent losing anything. I guess that there are no motherboards left for sale anywhere for upgrading?
 
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I tried with (1) just zram using the default config provided by PNDconfig and (2) using swap on a second SD card. (1) gets you a bit further but it still gets stuck. (2) works fine.
 
Thanks for the reply. I did wonder if I should add a swap file. I used one previously, though it eventually killed my SD card and I lost a lot of stuff. I could use a second SD card for swap, to prevent losing anything. I guess that there are no motherboards left for sale anywhere for upgrading?
Configuring your fstab to mount the SD can with noatime might help with thrashing cards. That said I'm currently running half of this laptop's OS off an SD card after the internal drive crontroller died, and I've still not configured that to mount with noatime, and I've been using it like that since early 2017 and it's not died yet, but that said I don't very often run swap. It is a sandisk ultra card though, so I did pay a little more for better reliability, but not so much that I went for an Extreme card.
 
I'm using a swap partition and it's the only partition on the card, so noatime is not relevant. I could play with swappiness etc but I just wanted to try out xash3d. The card that died before was one I ordered when I first got my pandora so it was old and probably the technology has improved since then (it's a CC unit I preordered in 2009 from c****x).

It would be interesting to know how much RAM is really required for xash3d, zram configured for total ram - 100mb is quite close to OK, it crashed on the way to the initial experiment. However performance (at 800MHz with swap anyway) is not really good enough to play comfortably in any case, going jumpy and dropping well below 15 fps when you are trying to chase something around with a crowbar is a bit frustrating!
 
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