Tomb Raider Runs on an ESP32-P4 at 30 FPS With OpenLara

Tomb Raider Comes to a Microcontroller

Thirty years after Tomb Raider first shipped, the game's 3D adventuring now runs on a chip that costs a few dollars. A developer working as alexkid77 has ported OpenLara, XProger's open-source reimplementation of the classic Tomb Raider engine, to Espressif's ESP32-P4 microcontroller. Hackaday highlighted the project on September 10, and it is a vivid demonstration of how far microcontrollers have come.

• Chip: ESP32-P4 with two RISC-V cores at 400 MHz, 16MB of flash and 32MB of PSRAM
• Rendering: software renderer at 320x240, hardware-scaled to a 1024x600 MIPI DSI display by the chip's Pixel Processing Accelerator
• Performance: about 30 FPS, according to the project's README
• Game data: you supply your own Tomb Raider 1 files on microSD; none are included

How Does OpenLara Fit on an ESP32-P4?

This is a native port, not an emulator. Emulating a 1990s console on a microcontroller would burn most of the chip's cycles on pretending to be different hardware. OpenLara instead reimplements the game engine directly, so the ESP32-P4 runs game logic and rendering as ordinary code.

The port leans on OpenLara's MS-DOS-flavored software renderer, drawing each frame at 320x240 in RGB565. The ESP32-P4's Pixel Processing Accelerator then scales that frame up to the board's 1024x600 panel in hardware, so the CPU cores never spend time on upscaling. It is the same trick that makes this RISC-V microcontroller such a capable display controller in other projects.

Memory planning is careful. All game memory lives in the 32MB of PSRAM running at 200 MHz, leaving the chip's faster internal SRAM free for DMA buffers and task stacks. Audio runs at 44.1 kHz stereo through an ES8311 codec over I2S, with MP3 and OGG decoding, and there is a frame-rate counter overlaid on the game.

What Hardware Do You Need to Try It?

The target is Espressif's ESP32-P4-Function-EV-Board with its 1024x600 MIPI DSI LCD. The README specifies an ESP32-P4 chip revision below 3.0, 16MB of flash and 32MB of PSRAM in HEX mode. Controls come from a USB HID keyboard using the boot protocol, and the GT911 capacitive touchscreen is supported as well.

To build it you need ESP-IDF 5.4 or newer (the developer tested 5.4.4 and 5.5.5) with the riscv32-esp-elf toolchain. The code is GPL-3.0, following OpenLara itself. The one thing you cannot download is the game: the port needs the original Tomb Raider 1 data files, including levels and cutscenes, copied from your own copy of the game onto a microSD card.

Why the ESP32-P4 Keeps Surprising Makers

Hackaday's point is a fun one: a modern development board with a microcontroller on it is now a quicker route to playing Tomb Raider than tracking down an original console and discs. The more useful takeaway for makers is what the port reveals about headroom. If a dual-core 400 MHz chip can push a software-rendered 3D game at 30 FPS while decoding audio, it has plenty left for dashboards, HMI panels and camera interfaces.

The same developer has already ported DOOM to the ESP32-P4, and this chip has a habit of running things it has no business running, from our story on classic Mac OS on an ESP32-P4 devkit onward. If you are choosing a chip for your own build, our ESP32 variant buyer's guide sets the P4 against the rest of the family. More maker hardware lives in our mini computer section.

Sources: openlara_esp32p4 on GitHub — September 2026; Hackaday — September 10, 2026.