Raspberry Pi Gaming thread - Cheap emulation and gaming projects

subbing to this as I just ordered a raspberry pi 3. Hopefully will get it delivered and all up and running by end of next week!

Been getting the urge to get MAME and other stuff up and running just like the original arcades on my HDTV.
 
Anyone know of a decent tutorial for getting 0.78 MAME roms working with mame2003/mame-libretro? I'm having no luck with it.
Can't easily get the links on my phone right now, but check out the MAME section on the Retropie wiki. You'll see a part where they're talking about converting ROMs to the appropriate versions for the Libretro version of MAME that comes installed with Retropie.

That's your best option for fixing ROMs that aren't launching.
 
Is there any way to sync hlsl mame configuration with retroarch shaders? I would like consistency between consoles and arcade when displaying.
 
Hi guys I have a pi2B and I'm trying to map my DS4 controller the Dreamcast emulator and no matter what I do the mapped buttons do not work.
 
Can't easily get the links on my phone right now, but check out the MAME section on the Retropie wiki. You'll see a part where they're talking about converting ROMs to the appropriate versions for the Libretro version of MAME that comes installed with Retropie.

That's your best option for fixing ROMs that aren't launching.

Thanks. Finally managed to get it working.

Is there any way to exit a game using your controller on MAME are do you need to have a keyboard plugged in?
 
Thanks. Finally managed to get it working.

Is there any way to exit a game using your controller on MAME are do you need to have a keyboard plugged in?
Well, I'd highly suggest using lr-mame2003 as your emulator in Retropie since it has the best balance of compatibility and performance and is libretro so it will honor all of your controller settings and use Start + Select to exit.
 
Well, I'd highly suggest using lr-mame2003 as your emulator in Retropie since it has the best balance of compatibility and performance and is libretro so it will honor all of your controller settings and use Start + Select to exit.

Cool. I had intended to but I switched to mame2000 as that was what the tutorial used. I'll just repurpose for 2003. Thanks again!
 
Looks like Dolphin support was added in Retropie 4.0.2. How do i update without starting again? Do i just update Binaries?

Anyone want to try simple 2D games like Castlevania or Contra Rebirth and report back framerate?
 
Looks like Dolphin support was added in Retropie 4.0.2. How do i update without starting again? Do i just update Binaries?

Anyone want to try simple 2D games like Castlevania or Contra Rebirth and report back framerate?

Dolphin support is x86 only, make sure you make a backup and run the update from teh menu ..
 
So got the Pi3 and son installed retropie on it without problems. :) Any advatages having recallbox instead? Is it updated faster or performs better?
 
Is there a way in ES to arrange games from multiple systems under one banner?

Like say if I wanted to have every fighting game under one menu is that at all possible?
 
Is there a way in ES to arrange games from multiple systems under one banner?

Like say if I wanted to have every fighting game under one menu is that at all possible?

Not that i know of but i have accidentally discovered if you put Mega Drive roms in the Genesis folder it will all show up under the Genesis banner. I'm not sure about other systems.
 
I've just been given a first generation Raspberry Pi.

What limits can I expect for emulation? I'd like to be able to play Amiga and PSX.

Am I out of luck? Do I need to buy something newer?
 
I've just been given a first generation Raspberry Pi.

What limits can I expect for emulation? I'd like to be able to play Amiga and PSX.

Am I out of luck? Do I need to buy something newer?

I think PSone will be very hard to emulate. I have a Pi 3 and in order to run PSone games smoothly, I had to overclock the thing.

Considering the first generation Pi got a slower CPU than the Pi 3, I wouldn't bet on it being PSone capable.
 
So I managed to find somewhere a triple boot of Retropie/XBMC and Raspbian but it's an old build which I think I managed to update everything..

Strill ironing out things but I guess over time they will get sorted.

Anyway I noticed that the chip underneath next to the microSD slot gets hot perhaps hotter than any of the other chips and I was wondering if there are any cases that stand the pi vertically ?
4900621F-3719-42C2-A511-9FED293EEAA7.jpg
 
Anyone have any tips to play SNES optimally with a B+? I've tried messing around with the boot and retroarch configurations with not much luck. I've read people have had no issues running the SNES emulator on this Raspberry Pi. All the games I have tried ( SMW, MMX2, Super Metroid), all have slow down hiccups with the audio/video. Could it be due to using HDMI and connected to a monitor?
 
I put lakka on a raspberry pi3, and while it worked fine, the input lag was absolutely horrendous. Does Retropie and/or RecalBox have the same lag?
 
I put lakka on a raspberry pi3, and while it worked fine, the input lag was absolutely horrendous. Does Retropie and/or RecalBox have the same lag?

I found Retropie input lag pretty horrific by default, the follow retroarch.cfg tweaks helped:

video_driver = "dispmanx"
video_threaded = "false"

and using nestopia as the NES emulator instead of whatever the default is.

Although you lose shaders/overlays, the input lag drops to an acceptable level (I measured it at 4-5 frames (including display lag) with a high speed camera).

I'm mystified by people playing the setup out of the box, for NES era megaman games it's essentially unplayable for me. I'm probably more sensitive than most as I'm used to playing it on the real thing. I sometimes wonder if all the people complaining about NES era difficulty being too hard are just playing on high latency emulators where timing anything is impossible. :D
 
I put lakka on a raspberry pi3, and while it worked fine, the input lag was absolutely horrendous. Does Retropie and/or RecalBox have the same lag?

See my quoted post below for how I resolved input lag on my Pi2+. Switching to Dispmanx as your video driver will also reduce input lag, but I don't recommend it since you will lose the ability to use shaders and/or overlays. Trust me when I say that I am very sensitive to input lag and despise it, and these changes resulted in acceptably low delay for playing precise platformers and the like without having to sacrifice all of my cool overlays and shaders.

But if you want the lowest amount of input lag possible and don't care about shaders, switch the default video driver to Dispmanx. That's as low as it's gonna get in Retropie. Also make sure you're using Game Mode on your TV if it has one.

Here's what solved input lag for me whilst not sacrificing performance to a noticeable degree across NES/SNES/Genesis/FBA/Neo-Geo... etc.

  • Overclock your Pi 2+ in Retropie Menu > Raspi-Config > Overclock (the 1000Mhz setting)
  • Edit opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg and change the frame_delay setting to 10
  • Update both lbr-snes9x-next and lbr-fceumm to the latest binaries (they recently received updates that lessen input lag)
  • Make sure lbr-snes9x-next and lbr-fceumm are your default emulators for the SNES and NES cores, respectively
I just recently finished trying dozens of different approaches to eliminating input lag from my RetroPie setup because I'm very sensitive to input delay, and this is what I ended up with that yielded the best balance of performance and responsiveness.
 
I was kind of bummed out that I couldn't put PlayStation games on my on-board SD card without spending a fortune or installing a bulky hard drive, until I saw this.

large_45341_1469034041.jpg


Man! This thing is so small! It's like the size of a penny and it barely sticks out of the USB port on the Pi, yet it boosts 128 GB of storage for my PlayStation games. This thing is awesome! And it's less than $30 now.

Little warning about that USB stick. I only got the 64gb version and it gets quite hot. I managed to get about 90% of MAME roms working. There are a few like some of the 80's konami arcade games that won't boot up..
 
So I finally jumped in with a RaspberryPi 3 and RetroPie, and after a tiny amount of tinkering all is well except one (major) thing. When I use in-game saves or save states for SNES games, the emulator just creates a single SNES.srm or SNES.state file, and overwrites this file each time a save is used. I'd assumed it would create a state and srm for each rom, similar to other console emulators (NES works this way), so I'm kind of at a loss. RIght now my couple of roms are dumped into retroarch\roms\snes, which is where the SNES.srm and SNES.state files are created. Tonight I'm going to try moving the roms to their own subfolders to see if it will create a separate srm and state for each folder, but I don't know if RetroArch will recognize having roms in subfolders or not since I didn't see anything in the retroarch.cfg to point to a path where the roms are stored. Thoughts?

Edit: this seems to be consistent across SNES9x and PocketSNES, so I'm thinking it's not necessarily an emu problem.
 
I kind of want to rip apart my non-functioning SNES and turn it into the shell for a Raspberry Pi. I should be able to plug some USB hubs to get more USB connectors, or is there not enough energy for that kind of thing?
 
So I finally jumped in with a RaspberryPi 3 and RetroPie, and after a tiny amount of tinkering all is well except one (major) thing. When I use in-game saves or save states for SNES games, the emulator just creates a single SNES.srm or SNES.state file, and overwrites this file each time a save is used. I'd assumed it would create a state and srm for each rom, similar to other console emulators (NES works this way), so I'm kind of at a loss. RIght now my couple of roms are dumped into retroarchromssnes, which is where the SNES.srm and SNES.state files are created. Tonight I'm going to try moving the roms to their own subfolders to see if it will create a separate srm and state for each folder, but I don't know if RetroArch will recognize having roms in subfolders or not since I didn't see anything in the retroarch.cfg to point to a path where the roms are stored. Thoughts?

Edit: this seems to be consistent across SNES9x and PocketSNES, so I'm thinking it's not necessarily an emu problem.

You can use multiple save state slots for any ROM. Hold Select and then press left or right to cycle through State 0, 1, 2... etc. It will show you what slot you have selected in yellow text in the bottom left of your screen. After you've selected a slot, Select + R will save to that slot and Select + L will load from that slot.

Edit: Oh, I just reread your post. I don't know what would cause that to happen. The default behavior is saving states on a per-ROM basis.
 
An update - tracked the issue down to having a special character (#) in the file name, causing the .SRM and .state files to only use whatever came after the character, in this case "SNES". Removed the # and all is well.
 
Little warning about that USB stick. I only got the 64gb version and it gets quite hot. I managed to get about 90% of MAME roms working. There are a few like some of the 80's konami arcade games that won't boot up..

I actually ended up going with Samsung's version. It actually has more space than SanDisk's version, has much better transfer rates, and it doesn't get hot.
 
So I bought this display a month ago and it finally came at around £3 or $4 I wasn't expecting it to use it for gaming since it was 2.4" and mostly wanted it for another project but I installed the display driver from adafruit onto retropie and was able to get a very nice 60FPS out of it just by using the GPIO pins and nothing else. AT 320x240 it looks stunning and pretty easy to setup. It might be great for anyone who wants to work on a portable version of retropie there is also a 2.8" model as well on ebay.


For $4 it's pretty solid.
 
So I bought this display a month ago and it finally came at around £3 or $4 I wasn't expecting it to use it for gaming since it was 2.4" and mostly wanted it for another project but I installed the display driver from adafruit onto retropie and was able to get a very nice 60FPS out of it just by using the GPIO pins and nothing else. AT 320x240 it looks stunning and pretty easy to setup. It might be great for anyone who wants to work on a portable version of retropie there is also a 2.8" model as well on ebay.



For $4 it's pretty solid.
How's the input lag?
 
It's here:

dnOVlv7.jpg


And yeah, it is very small. And I didn't like the L2/R2 position. They should've move them in a stacked fashion, like the Dualshocks.

But it is a very nice controller to play anything that won't need shoulder buttons on Recalbox. Plus, it works very well on Android, meaning that I could finally play some games on the Gear VR.
 
The 8bitdo controllers are shit. To go all 180* for a second the buttons feel amazing and click nicely but that input lag is horrible. The iBuffalo SNES controller not only feels just as good but the input lag is night and day. The iBuffalo is also much cheaper aswell and can be gotten for like $11 from Japan delivered.

The 8bitdo will be fine for iOS/Android devices but is not good on a Raspberry Pi.
 
I've been playing a lot of SNES/PSone games with it and didn't see any problems with input lag.

The shoulder buttons placement is really annoying.
 
Got tired of looking at my unused Ion Icade (which had skyrocketed in price as of late), and tore it apart. Modded it with Sanwa buttons, stick and octagonal gate. Ordered a 10.1 LCD for my RPi3 Emulation Station setup. Plan to slap it all together over the weekend.

Looking forward!
 
Can you map controls to the touch screen?

I don;'t think you can. Point and click titles might work if the adafruit driver supports it.

Got tired of looking at my unused Ion Icade (which had skyrocketed in price as of late), and tore it apart. Modded it with Sanwa buttons, stick and octagonal gate. Ordered a 10.1 LCD for my RPi3 Emulation Station setup. Plan to slap it all together over the weekend.

Looking forward!


10.1 might not fit if I recall, was going to use icade cabinet as well but instead made my own for my 10.1" screen/
 
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