Daisy Chain of Hacks Lets New Arm Board Run Doom

Running DOOM on an ARM board? That's not newsworthy. But running the 2016 version of DOOM on an ARM SBC? Now that's interesting. The ARM SBC in question is the Radxa Orion O6, which claims to be the world's first open-source ARMv9 motherboard. It boasts a 12-core ARM9.2 SoC from Cix and a PCIe x16 slot to fit a graphics card.

But what about the onboard graphics? Unfortunately, that's only suitable for older versions of DOOM, not the modern one we're trying to run here. So, some hacking is required. The solution lies in an x86 emulation layer called FEX, which is used to run Steam. But that's not all - a Proton compatibility layer is also needed to sit between the Linux system and the Windows system calls the games are making.

So, what we have here? A compatibility layer on top of an emulator running on another emulator running on ARM hardware, with a Linux system sitting in the middle. Yeah, that's a hack, and possibly a bit cursed. But amazingly, it works - as long as you use a PCI 3.0 graphics card.

Unfortunately, newer cards aren't compatible, at least according to [Interfacing Linux]. Some users have reported better luck with newer NVIDIA cards, though.

The system is still plagued by GPU throttling on older games - but that's not entirely surprising, considering the CPU should be handling all the emulation. The amazing thing is that it works at all. And if you're feeling adventurous, [Interfacing Linux] has a video showing off their SteamOS console (which we covered last week).

The Radxa board has made an appearance on Hackaday before, but it's not as popular as some of the other ARM boards out there. So, if you've got a good project using one of these powerful ARM boards - or anything else entirely - don't hesitate to send us a tip! We'd love to see what you're working on.