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Thanks herbfargus. Not sure why I didn’t think of that until sometime after my original post – I use github anyway!

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Thanks for confirming that Zerojay, I thought I was going slightly insane there for a while!

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I’ve just set up RetroPie 3 on a new Pi 3.

I’ve overclocked the Arm to 1300, and the sdram to 500. Whilst it is stable, in a stress test running all four cores it hits 82 degrees c and throttles back (I’ve been reading that the SoC heat output varies wildly on the Pu 3, with one report that fully and overclocked to 1500 it is only hitting 60c…)

As the emulators all appear to be single-threaded the heat-thrittling isn’t an issue, so far

PlayStation emulation is excellent even with enhanced resolution output.

N64 emulation is a different matter; using mupen64plus (non-libretro) on an overclocked Pi 2, on RetroPie 2.6, Mario 64 is flawless, Mario Kart is 95‰, although most other titles are very rough.

On RetroPie 3.6 on Pi 3, Mario 64 is fine, Mario Kart seems worse. I hoped GoldenEye would be playable, but it seems worse if any thing.

It appears that the renderers are outputting much higher resolution visuals than before, even when the resolution is set to 320×200, and the framebuffer set accordingly.
I’ve tried various all three plugins, but don’t seem able to match the performance of the older, slower, system on the new setup.

Any hints on how to configure n64 on RetroPie 3, on a Pi 3 will be gratefully received – I’m new to Retropie 3.x, having stuck with 2.6 since last May, and perhaps I’ve missed some fundamentals.

In case it’s significant, I installed RetroPie on top of Noobs Raspbian (updated and upgraded), as I intended to multi-boot with Osmc.

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I still haven’t had opportunity to set mine up…

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Ah, okay – thanks for clarifying this. Thought it seemed a rather huge increase!

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Article on The Register lists the tech specs of the new Pi in detail. Ram is now clocked at 900mhz

Raspberry Pi celebrates fourth birthday with fruity version 3

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Are you using an SD card with RetroPie that’s been taken from your Pi 2?
Wondering whether to use NOOBS to get the latest pi 3 compatible Raspbian, then install RetroPie – but if you’ve already done this, not sure what to try.
May just run overclock tests in the meantime (but not today unfortunately, haven’t even plugged it in yet).

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I’ll investigate that new NOOBS build – thanks for mentioning it

[Edit] the latest NOOBS release notes state:

2016-02-26:
* Support added for Pi 3, including Wifi and Bluetooth
* Option to set wifi country code added to raspi-config

No mention of 64 bit at this stage.

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The email I received yesterday which revealed the Pi 3 mentioned that the new 64 bit ARM CPU was chosen in part for its 32 bit performance.

I would expect/hope that the existing Raspbian, and RetroPie, should install and run, and benefit from the enhanced clock speeds, if the GPU has no compatibility issues – I see that the Pi 3 GPU is now dual core.

Certainly rebuilds of the o/s, and individual emulators, to take advantage of the 64bit CPU, and perhaps updated gfx plugins, would reap the most benefits, but the new CPU is considerably faster than the best overclock performance I can get from my Pi 2.

Fingers crossed

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If GoldenEye runs at a playable framerate I’ll be ecstatic…
I’d like some idea of the overclock thresholds before I start turning up the speed.
If there’s no imminent new Raspbian build then I can’t look to rasbpi-config for guidance. I’d better start googling.

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My Pi 3 and uprated PSU have a arrived (2.5a, 5v). Want to get cracking, but can’t just yet – frustrating!

[Edit] apologies for the rotation on the pictures – look okay on the tablet, but must be a meta-flag only, leaving some of the photos sideways or upside down…

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I’ll bet – it’s odd that the Pi 3 just suddenly arrived – maybe people were ‘in the know’ given the Pi 2 released same time last year, but first I heard a about it was an email this morning from The Pi Hut.

Thought I’d better get one quick in case of the usual supply/demand issues (that said RS Components showed 17,000 in stock this afternoon…)

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Forgot to add, I’ll run extensive overclock tests as per my previous runs on the Pi 2:

Overclocking and Stability Testing the Raspberry Pi 2 – Part 1: Overclocking in Depth

Part 2: Stress testing the CPU with mprime

Part 3: Stress testing the RAM with Memtester

Part 4: Stress testing the SD card storage with the Stability Test Script

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Ordered mine from RS Components in the UK today, hopefully being delivered tomorrow.
Really hoping for full-speed 32X, enhanced resolution PlayStation on most or all games, and more playable n64 titles.
If I can help with testing, please let me know.

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Hi,

As mentioned above, I’ve now added posts on basic usage of the Command Shell for those not used to Linux, or for command lines at all:

The first post introduces various tools for monitoring the Raspberry Pi’s hardware and running programmes, and covers basic usage of the Package Manager (APT) tool for installing software from the command line:

Don’t Fear The Command Line: Raspbian Linux Shell Commands and Tools – Part 1

The second post focuses solely on navigating the file system from the shell, along with a useful package which can be installed to help visualise the file tree structure (as it’s very easy to get lost without a GUI to help guide you):

Navigating the Raspberry Pi’s File System. Raspbian Linux Shell Commands and Tools – Part 2

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Just to cover all possibilities, I’ll note that there are a great many fake sd cards out there – the actual storage space and the reported storage space do not match (e.g. a 32GB card is actually an 8gb card with the header information altered to report the larger size).
It’s most likely the issue is due to the overhead on the image, which I’ve seen before, but it’s worth eliminating the slight chance the new card isn’t all it seems to be.

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Hi efraimsangil,

Many thanks for the congrats, it’s great to get positive feedback.

There’s more Pi / RetroPie posts in progress. Currently I’m adding articles on using the Raspbian command shell for those not used to Linux, or for command lines at all.

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Hi MRKane,

Thanks for the very positive feedback, it’s great to hear.

Regarding voltage, I’m using a well-built 2Amp psu, with in-built cable – As you note, this is critical for the Pi to work reliably, especially when overclocking. I wrote a blog post on the importance of the PSU, and some information regarding the quality of usb cables:

Looking after your Pi – Part 1 – The Importance of a Quality Power Supply (PSU)

The hardware I’m using is detailed in this post:

Overview of Raspberry Pi and retro-gaming system hardware

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Hi Omninja,

Regarding temperatures, from my notes it seems that my Pi 2 would generally peak around 73 degrees Celsius when testing with mprime, with an ambient temperature somewhere between 20c and 25c. This is with the system overclocked with the settings I finally settled on (overvolt is +3, which increases the heat somewhat).

As long as the force_turbo option hasn’t been used (which at the time of writing will invalidate the warranty), the Pi’s governor will shut off the overclock if the temperature hits 85c, returning everything to the default values, until the temperature drops.

Running a real-world application, for example Rage Racer on the RetroPie Playstation emulator, it was around 50c. It seems that other emulators were also hitting about the same temp, including the megadrive 32x and Mupen64 N64 emulators. I believe all of these are single-core emulators, so they don’t drive the CPU as hard as the mprime test.

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Hi.
Assuming there were no error messages, that indicates all is okay with that test – mprime is searching for prime numbers in the range you specify; what matters is that the programme runs to completion without problems. It’s a very CPU intensive task, hence very useful for overclock testing.

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Thanks for the positive feedback zigurana and dankcushions.
Regarding the TLDR ‘how fast can we go’, I wasn’t aiming to overclock to extreme limits, only to get my stock Pi 2 to run as fast as possible, whilst being as stable as I could make it (although I realise now that I haven’t included any GPU specific tests alongside the CPU, RAM, and SD card)
The final maximum settings I was able to achieve were:

arm_freq=1050
core_freq=525
sdram_freq=450
over_voltage=3

As dankcushions also discovered the raspi-config Pi 2 settings had an sdram_freq that was too high for the silicon in my particular Pi to handle; I was able to push the GPU and CPU higher than the raspi-config settings, albeit with slightly more over_voltage.

I did review extreme overclocking, and found one guy who really took this seriously, getting the CPU up to 1500mhz; he used a combination of liquid nitrogen on the CPU, and heating on the RAM to prevent it literally freezing!

He provides information in several posts on the Raspberrypi.org forums in a thread that can be found here:
https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=107149

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