Banana Pi with RetroPie

[phipix01]

If you guys don’t allready know, there is a Banana Pi coming soon. which has significantly more performance:

Dual Core

1GB DDR3 RAM (RPi has 512MB DDR2)

SATA Port

Android OS Support (tons of games :D)

…

Imagine yourself running the OS and all of your ROMS on a SATA Drive, which has higher Data Transfer Rate while Overclocking that little baby’s dual core to 1.4GHz.
N64 and PSX ROM’s shouldn’t be a problem anymore i guess.

My question now: what has to be adapted on the retroPie Image to use it?

[karloss]

I’ve got one, and I tried it, everything seemed to compile ok..

but EmulationStation wouldn’t start..

[InsecureSpike]

[quote=6769]I’ve got one, and I tried it, everything seemed to compile ok..

but EmulationStation wouldn’t start..
[/quote]

where did you get it from?
thanks

[gizmo98]

I’m not sure if RetroPie works out of the box. You need at least a hard float distribution. It should be a debian derivate like ubuntu or raspbian. There should also be gpu support. Banana pi uses an armv7 soc. So some files should be updated:

https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/master/retropie_setup.sh
current:
__default_cflags=”-O2 -pipe -mfpu=vfp -march=armv6j -mfloat-abi=hard”
armv7:
__default_cflags=”-O2 -pipe -mfpu=neon -march=armv7 -mfloat-abi=hard”

Emulationstation requires gcc-4.7, SDL2 and /usr/lib/libEGL.so.

Many emulators are optimized for armv6 or the videocore of the raspberry pi soc. With a fast armv7 soc you could use common libretro cores like bsnes-libreto or mupen64plus-libretro:
https://github.com/libretro

[karloss]

Here

took about 2 weeks to come to uk, its an ok piece of kits, just needs better support…

[roquen]

The Banana Pi looks like its made by a fake company and it doesn’t have the same mission as Raspberry Pi, which means it wont have the same native support, if any support at all.

The grammar on the website is also terrible. Feels very much like a phishing attempt, honestly.

[theinsomniac]

It looks like Raspberry Pi now has a cheap Chinese knock-off. I guess this means it has truly arrived?

And it should be called Banana Cream Pi. Idiots.

[nepukadnezar]

Is there any update available in this topic?

Can anyone say if the RetroPie Project SD-card Image would work on this faster PI?

[gizmo98]

It will not work. RetroPie binaries are optimized for ArmV6 + Broadcom Videocore without X11.

Olimex A20 has the same problem:

olimex a20 .Is it compatible?

[trimmtrabb]

[quote=19070]Is there any update available in this topic?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Banana-SBC-single-board-computer/dp/B00LJZLJPK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406188288&sr=8-1&keywords=banana+pi

Can anyone say if the RetroPie Project SD-card Image would work on this faster PI?
[/quote]

It’s not a ‘faster Pi’ it’s a clone (granted increased specs) product from a completely unrelated company to the Raspberry Pi foundation who are riding on the success of the Raspberry Pi. It will never recieve the kind of community support the Pi has.

[osomerandomguy]

So I just got my banana pi and set it up as a Domain Controller which I did with my raspberry pi and the Banana Pi is just so much faster. While I do agree that it is riding on the success of the Raspberry Pi, if they are not going to upgrade its hardware a little, then I will try a similar project. The fact that it can run Raspbian makes it worth it. I will state that Banana Pi works so much faster for Domain issues. Log on scripts would take 5 mins to run after signing in on the Raspberry but is instant on the Banana.

That being said, I tried to install emulationstation on the banana and just doesn’t work. I was hoping that someone has looked into this as I am just getting started and really havent ventured into Linux to much beside the basic basic stuff.

[bobbyt]

I recommend watching this, it compares them:

I came across it a couple days ago and it direcctly addresses emulation as well…

[karloss]

Yeah, but the guy is an idiot, comparing using RetroPie with emulationstation, is not the same as running RetroArch app on Android…completely different experience…

I have the banana, and for the most part, its useless…

[gizmo98]

BananiPi is useless without support. My A20 powered olimex board is now running more or less with a modified RetroPie-Setup. RetroArch cores run faster. Shaders cannot be used (slow). Some emulators do not run, because there is no support (gpsp, all rpi optimized emus). There is no modified RetroPie for BananaPi…

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