[cacophony555]

[quote=118923]logitech f310 works fine for me. on 3.5 currently. will be on 3.6 soon
[/quote]

I’ll be curious to see if it still works on 3.6 for you.

[cacophony555]

[quote=119584]However powerful Raspberry Pi’s get, most people are never satisfied anyway and end up frying it by overclocking to the max ?!? I like to use mine at the stock speed (or retropie safe defaults) the way it was intended when it was built. Any Android TV device, which are very cheap now, can wipe the floor with the Pi on every emulator. For example, ePSXe on Android has almost 100% compatibility. They even ported some of the code to the PC version of ePSXe because it is so good.

I’m not sure why they added a 64-bit compatible processor, there isn’t even a 64-bit operating system yet. I suppose it’s just for future proofing. The Pi wasn’t actually made for emulation, it’s just possible to do.
[/quote]

I have an Nvidia Shield TV, which is pretty impressive at emulating more modern consoles. I can get stable framerates in various GameCube (Wind Waker, Twilight Princess) and Wii (New Super Mario Bros) titles with the latest Dolphin emulator, which I never would have guessed considering the PC hardware requirements for those titles.

But I’d still rather use my pi for nes/mastersystem/snes/genesis/tg16/etc emulation. As good as the individual emulators are for Android, I have yet to find a frontend that comes even close to Emulation Station. GameSome is quite lame in comparison. Once you get RetroPie setup it’s a far more satisfying experience, and the community surrounding it is great too.

I haven’t gotten my hands on a pi 3 yet, but I’m looking forward to it, even if the performance improvements are relatively small.

[cacophony555]

Well one reason is that the more recent versions no longer work with one of the most popular gamepad options: Logitech F310.

[cacophony555]

Just use a usb switch to cut power to the pi completely and it will work fine with your auto hdmi switch. Here’s the one I use: https://www.adafruit.com/products/1620

Just make sure to shutdown in emulationstation first to avoid corrupting the card.

[cacophony555]

Ah, yes setting smooth_video to false fixed it, thanks. Any particular reason why it’s enabled by default now?

[cacophony555]

Not sure which one you’re referring to but this one works great (though it’s only for SNES controllers): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002IXZ5DE/

[cacophony555]

Does the new per ROM emulator selection functionality work for MAME with 3.0 Beta ?

[cacophony555]

FWIW, I have about 4000 roms spread across 6 systems with everything scraped and don’t see any major performance issues on my Pi 2. Emulationstation loads in about 10 seconds and I can launch/quit games within a couple seconds.

[cacophony555]

I’ve found Nestopia to be noticeably better. One example is the smoothness of the screen scrolling in Ghosts and Goblins.

[cacophony555]

a). For my original Pi setup I absolutely needed an overclock to achieve a decent framerate on snes games. Like you I just had a passive heatsink and I went with the 900 Mhz overclock. There is no way to achieve decent snes sound on the pi 1 as it simply doesn’t have the necessary horsepower. Some people don’t notice but if you try certain games (or know what to listen for) it isn’t even close to passable. You’ll need to upgrade to a Pi 2 if you want decent snes sound emulation.

b & d) For snes on the original pi your best option is the standalone piSnes (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pisnes/). This standalone version is part of retropie though they may have altered the name slightly.

c) In theory you can get slightly better performance by forcing the output resolution to something lower like VGA but I can’t say I’ve noticed a difference.

e) Not sure about this one. What phone are you talking about here? It’s possible that it’s a newer arm architecture that’s more efficient (and hence not directly comparable using just Mhz). It’s also possible that the emulator itself has been optimized more for that platform.

[cacophony555]

This might help with the Cave Story issue:
https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/708

[cacophony555]

snes9x-next is the most accurate/compatible snes option (especially if you consider sound emulation), but is only suitable for the Pi 2. It does struggle a bit with some SuperFX games, though.

nestopia is noticeably better than fceu in my experience for nes

genesis-plus-gx should be the best option for both mastersystem and genesis if you have a Pi 2. For the Pi 1 you would want to use picodrive for the genesis.

Not sure about GBA

[cacophony555]

[quote=92013]I know that, but it is possibe to get to the regular raspbian and still have RetroPie on it?[/quote]

RetroPie has regular Raspbian, just with a few packages uninstalled (that you’re free to re-install and maybe don’t need anyways). It would help if you actually said why you want to dual boot.

But yeah there’s plenty of info on dual booting a pi, and from your first comment it sounds like you’ve already done it in the past:
https://www.google.com/search?q=dual+boot+raspberry+pi&btnG=–%3E&gws_rd=ssl

[cacophony555]

[quote=92019]

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>cacophony555 wrote:</div>
The latest default snes emulator (as of about a week ago) is snes9x-next, which is far superior to pocketsnes in terms of accuracy, but it struggles a bit with certain Super FX games like Star Fox.

Is there a way to change this default behavior on a 2.6 SD image install without manually changing the core that is defined in the es_systems,cfg? Do I just install the lr-snes9x-next LR core?
[/quote]

yes, just hit “x” right after launching a game to bring up the launch configuration menu.

[cacophony555]

As stated above RetroPie is already running on top of Raspbian.

If you’re looking to have a dual purpose retro gaming setup and media center there are existing solutions that you may want to consider:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=59590
http://www.recalbox.com/

There are also ways to modify RetroPie to support launching into XBMC but it would take some work.

[cacophony555]

Stella is the 2600 emulator.

[cacophony555]

What nes retroarch core are you running? Nestopia is too cpu intensive for the Pi 1, so you should Fceux instead.

Also have you verified that no other unexpected processes are consuming CPU while you run a NES game? Try telnetting to the pi while nes is running and doing a “top”.

[cacophony555]

[quote=91900]Confused… I’m playing the U.S. Version

However, I am now running into problems with the Pi freezing lots… Hmmm nothing but puzzles
[/quote]

I’d remove the overclock settings (last four lines if I recall) from /boot/config.txt and see if the freezing goes away.

The crackling sound might be the rom itself.

[cacophony555]

I just filed an issue for those that are interested:
https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/741

[cacophony555]

FYI, I just filed an issue:
https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/738

[cacophony555]

[quote=91737]I’m not really certain starwing was as fast as the pocketsnes emulation. Pocketsnes runs really snappy but seems to be toooo fast. snes9x-next seems to run slower but there is no audio crackling or input lag. Retroarch runs at decent 60fps. I really think snes9x-next resamples the real behavior of the original hardware.[/quote]

Ahh, maybe with overclocking? I’m currently running without an overclock and when I tested Star Fox I was seeing 50ish fps, which did feel significantly slower. But it’s a good point that the original snes hardware struggled too, and more accurate emulators reproduce those slowdowns even while maintaining 60fps. For example Super Ghouls and Ghosts often exhibits a few slowdown points in the first level, but you can see the emulator is still running at 60fps.

[cacophony555]

Try pressing “x” immediately after launching Star Fox and then setting the emulator to pocketsnes. The latest default snes emulator (as of about a week ago) is snes9x-next, which is far superior to pocketsnes in terms of accuracy, but it struggles a bit with certain Super FX games like Star Fox. The videos you saw online were probably running with pocketsnes (which is an based on an older version snes9x that’s less accurate but faster on older hardware). If you want you can set just certain games to use pocketsnes.

To be clear, snes9x-next runs at full frame rate on virtually every snes game and is the much better choice overall IMO, but there are a few games that are better to run under pocketsnes, and Star Fox is one of them.

[cacophony555]

[quote=91550]Did you ever figure this out? I tested it on my rpi2 and cmake worked. Still waiting for the make command to complete. The error makes it sound like your compiler is missing.

Edit:
The make worked. I haven’t run the binary since I didn’t want to have it converting my xml’s in to sqlite, etc.
[/quote]

I never did figure it out. I did check that all the c/c++ compilers were available, including /usr/bin/gcc and g++-4.7.

So all you ended up doing were these four lines?

git clone https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation
cd EmulationStation
git checkout unstable
cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-4.7 .

At this point I’ll probably just wait until this is pulled into master as I just redid my setup from scratch and want to keep things clean for the time being.

[cacophony555]

@gizmo98, perhaps it’s time for a new image to be released ?

[cacophony555]

I’m guessing 4 and 5 can be solved by modifying your runcommand.sh
(https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/master/supplementary/runcommand.sh)
so that this line near the end:

# run command
eval $command

is changed to

# run command
eval $command > /dev/null 2>&1

Give it a try. I don’t have my Pi available at the moment but you can find the location of this file by doing this:
find . -name runcommand.sh

You’ll still probably get the black screen though.

[cacophony555]

If you didn’t mess with resolution/aspect ratio settings before then I would try switching the aspect ratio of your TV. It’s possible you have it on some sort of stretch mode.

The reason I say this is because the 2.6 image by default displayed the retroarch NES emulators at a 4:3 ratio on my 16:9 TV. It looks great and I didn’t have to change a thing. When you start messing with the aspect ratio correction in retroarch the output image gets fuzzier in my experience.

[cacophony555]

buzz, I just verified that the issues with mednafen-pce-fast and mame4all are both fixed by your recent changes. I also saw your very nice improvements to the launch settings screen. Thanks! So at this point everything seems to be working very well. I haven’t tried all the systems but I have played with the biggies: mame, nes, mastersystem, pcengine, snes, and genesis

[cacophony555]

I reproduced similar errors trying to build emulation station outside of the retropie setup script:

So following the instructions here:
http://www.emulationstation.org/gettingstarted.html#install_rpi_standalone

I skipped down to this part:

git clone https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation
cd EmulationStation
git checkout unstable
cmake -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=g++-4.7 .

And I did try adding -DFREETYPE_INCLUDE_DIRS=/usr/include/freetype2/ before the “.” as suggested in the comments.

But the cmake line always gives similar errors to the above log. I did verify that all the dependencies were installed though I didn’t do the “Compile and install SDL2” part (which I’m assuming was already set up as part of my recent retropie image).

[cacophony555]

Unfortunately it looks like the above idea doesn’t work. I got the following error when trying to use the retropie setup script to build after adding “unstable” to the end of the gitPullOrClone line in emulationstation.sh:

http://pastebin.com/aGcHD648

Any ideas?

[cacophony555]

One more issue. It looks like mame4all is failing to launch. Here’s the tail of the es_log.txt if it helps:

lvl2:   Attempting to launch game...
lvl2:           /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ mame4all /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame4all/outruna.zip
lvl2:   Creating surface...
lvl2:   Created window successfully.
lvl2:   Added known joystick Logitech Gamepad F310 (instance ID: 0, device index: 0)
lvl2:   Added known joystick Logitech Gamepad F310 (instance ID: 0, device index: 0)
lvl2:    req sound [basic.launch]
lvl2:      (missing)
lvl2:   Attempting to launch game...
lvl2:           /opt/retropie/supplementary/runcommand/runcommand.sh 0 _SYS_ mame4all /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame4all/outrun.zip
lvl2:   Creating surface...
lvl2:   Created window successfully.
lvl2:   Added known joystick Logitech Gamepad F310 (instance ID: 0, device index: 0)
lvl2:   Added known joystick Logitech Gamepad F310 (instance ID: 0, device index: 0)
lvl2:   EmulationStation cleanly shutting down.

Or maybe changing the default mame emulator isn’t supported at all yet? I do know my romset works with mame4all (which is what I typically use)

[cacophony555]

First, let me say that this new functionality is a HUGE improvement. It’s never fun to have to manually modify es_systems.cfg or move roms, and having an easy way to associate specific roms with a different emulator is fantastic. So thanks for doing this !!! :)

Pretty smooth sailing thus far with a couple observations:

1. I changed the default pceengine emulator to mednafen-pce-fast core, but it fails to launch because it can’t find the .so file

2. I think this configuration screen might benefit from some usability improvements: http://malus.exotica.org.uk/~buzz/def1.png (I realize this screenshot isn’t up to date with the current version, and my comments below apply to current version, not the screenshot)

If there was a way to indicate that a rom specific override was set that might be useful. Maybe append a “*” to line 2 or 3, or display the override value as part of line 2, or not have the “remove” lines if there is no current override.

In the summary launch config at the top why not include the video mode as well?

Also, I still have no idea how to pick among these video modes. Like many people I have a 1080p TV. I see four possible 1920×1080 CEA modes but I have no idea why I’d pick one over the other. So if there was some instruction text or default recommendations for common display types that would probably prevent a lot of confusion, especially given that with this new functionality I would expect this config screen to be much more heavily used.

That’s it for now but I’ll post more observations as I see them. Thanks again!

[cacophony555]

[quote=91037]the makefile overrides our CFLAGS, I have committed a fix to the dev branch to patch it. This is unrelated to any new functionality with the new branch.
[/quote]

Yep, figured it was unrelated, but thanks for fixing it.

Ok, copying ROMs over and I’ll do some testing later today.

+1 on fixing the megadrive/genesis confusion

[cacophony555]

For me personally the reason for wanting Pi 2 optimized binaries is that I’m also testing/experimenting with cores to determine my ideal setup, and for that I really need optimized binaries.

Speaking of which :)

I added the experimental core for snes9x-next and did verify that it was using the Pi 2 appropriate compiler flags for the build, but when I did CATSFC it doesn’t seem to be using the Pi 2 flags:

http://pastebin.com/hg4UPgck

Any idea why?

[cacophony555]

Nice, glad to hear it worked! Notice that you can access the entire linux filesystem from the mac desktop, so assuming your roms are compatible you should be able to launch them.

[cacophony555]

[quote=91027]

<div class=”d4p-bbt-quote-title”>buzz wrote:</div>
regarding rpi2 optimised image – as I said in my post – just do a full binary install on it and you will get rpi2 optimised binaries – the equivalent of an rpi2 image then.

Only issue with doing that is it takes ages to complie the RPi2 image and if you want to do a fresh install at any point they you’d have to compile all over again. I’ll wait until there is a RPi2 image before testing i think
[/quote]

I think he means to just do the full binary install which I’m guessing is much quicker. I’m trying it right now…

edit: only took a few minutes to do the full binary install, so hopefully that does get me the pi 2 optimized binaries

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