Retrocycles
In Retrocycles (also known as Armagetron Advanced), you ride a bizarre vehicle that can never stop and leaves a deadly trail behind. In the most basic game mode, you can only make sudden right angle turns and are trapped with others in an inescapable arena. The last survivor wins. It’s essentially a remake of Tron, a coin-operated arcade video game manufactured and distributed by Bally Midway in the early 1980s. Retrocycles started development way back in 2004 but it’s still under active development.
Retrocycles has souped up graphics and gameplay. There’s offline single player mode, splitscreen multiplayer for up to 34 players, and online multiplayer for 16+ players per server. With four builtin game modes, there’s plenty of variety. And like SuperTuxKart, it’s open source too!
System requirements for Retrocycles are extremely low. Any OpenGL 1.2 capable card should be sufficient. The FIREBAT coped admirably. We got around 245 FPS at 1920×1080 resolution.
Having a game running with say over 240 FPS on a monitor only capable of displaying 144/165 FPS is just wasting electricity. Given the current high price of electricity, this is hardly thrifty. Step forward, libstrangle, a really useful utility which offers a convenient way to limit a game’s FPS. It works well, and is very useful when playing Retrocycles on the FIREBAT. But most modern games are far more demanding than Retrocycles.
Next page: Page 3 – Team Fortress 2 / DOTA 2 / Summary
Pages in this article:
Page 1 – SuperTuxKart
Page 2 – Retrocycles
Page 3 – Team Fortress 2 / DOTA 2 / Summary
Complete list of articles in this series:
| FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC | |
|---|---|
| Part 1 | Introduction to the series with an interrogation of the system |
| Part 2 | Benchmarking the FIREBAT T8 Plus Mini PC |
| Part 3 | Testing the power consumption |
| Part 4 | Multimedia: Watching videos and listening to music |
| Part 5 | How does the FIREBAT fare as a gaming PC? |
| Part 6 | Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 |
| Part 7 | Installing and Configuring EndeavourOS, an Arch-based distro |
| Part 8 | Installing and Configuring Rhino Linux, a rolling release Ubuntu-based distro |
| Part 9 | VirtualBox performance on the FIREBAT |
So the FIREBAT is rubbish at gaming!
Well it’s definitely not a gaming machine as portrayed in the marketing, but then again I knew that was the case given the cut-down Xe onboard graphics.