How to play Half Life in VR on 1.3

Posted on May 7, 2016 in Mods | 15 comments

A lot of people have been wanting to play Half Life and other old Steam VR games on the consumer version of the Rift but have been unable to do so because Valve dropped the support for it. Many people still think that it is impossible to play these games on the CV1 even after the release of the LibOVRWrapper because they think games that run only in extended mode will never work. But there is a way to get these extended mode games to run on 1.3.

1. Download and install LibOVRWrapper 1.2

2. Download and install the newest beta version of Steam VR

3. Download and install the Steam version of Virtual Desktop

4. Download and install the newest beta version of the old Valve VR game you want to play

5. Right click the game on the Steam desktop client and select properties

6. Deactivate the Game Theater option, close the window

7. Start the game on the desktop

8. Enable VR support in the Video Settings, set the game to 1080p, set the game to windowed mode

9. Restart the game and enable VR on the main menu

10. Alt tab into Steam and open Virtual Desktop

11. Set the SBS option “To Headset + Distortion”

12. Alt tab back to the Steam VR game

13. Enjoy your old Steam VR game on CV1

(This tutorial has been written using Half Life source as an example, it should work on all old games like HL2, HL2 ep1, HL2 ep2, Portal 1 VR beta and TF2. I have not yet tested this on all of them)

If you experience some stuttering in game that is because this can only run on the refresh rate of your monitor. If you want to fix this you can just overclock your monitor, there are a lot of tutorials out there on how to do this. But keep in mind that the resolution at which you overclock it has to be the same aspect ratio as 1920×1080.

If you are interested in VR check out our tutorials on How to launch external applications from within Oculus Home and How to stop Oculus Home from auto starting & stop Rift/Camera from running hot