@MikeM68 said in Plug and play systems. Recommendations?:

Found several retailers online and my favorite so far is a bar top by https://gameroomsolutions.com/

Like so many others, they're violating Retropie's many noncommercial licenses by selling Retropie as part of their GUTS pack ("pre-flashed with attract mode/retropie").

Like @quicksilver said, you'll get only support for the original RPie image here. So, I'd recommend shunning pre-built images and building your own system. In my experience, it's much more satisfying and you'll learn much in the process.

edit: For the sake of completeness, this thread lists many legal sources for roms. Be sure to check the later posts as well as the opening post, since the latter hasn't been updated since Dec 2017.

All the trackballs are pretty much the same.
The hardest part is make sure you use multimouse in MAME settings if you have more than 1 mouse device, as you want to be able to set device specific sensistivity values.

You can figure out per games sensivity values with some info from here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160421175734/http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Spinner_Turn_Count

is there anyplace we can check for regular updates?

I can highly recommend a Kite Circuit Sword Gameboy build like my own.

It's basically a RPi3+, so has a lot more raw power than the Zero builds like RetroFlag, but still no need for active cooling, fits into an original Gameboy case, and there's lots of batteries to choose from. Mine runs a 5200 mAh, which is charged via USB-C and holds power for around 10 hours.

Costs a bit, and takes a bit of tweaking of the case, but everything is pretty much plug'n'play, apart from soldering the speaker and a mode-button onto the board, but really worth it!

I just completed Links Awakening DX on this machine, before playing the new game on Switch, really enjoyed it.

Very likely, it wouldn't be ideal for serious gaming. Maybe only for emulation with rewind enabled :P

@archie456 Of course it exits, it is exactly the same. The folder structure is exactly the same even on different OSs, like for example Windows and Android.
https://kodi.wiki/view/Userdata

Screenshot from 2019-10-23 23-23-01.png

Thanks for the advice guys. I'll look around for a nice looking case with a quiet fan.

@TooBeaucoup said in Best settings for reducing controller lag? I'm at my wits end.:

I'm just curious if there's a thread or faq for some typically used settings for reducing controller input lag? I know that with any kind of emulation there's going to be some kind of lag, but damn, I just built my Pi to play retro games and I'm pretty astonished how noticeable my lag is. Every Mario game I try and play is pretty much impossible, due to having to push the jump button at, what feels like, a full second before I want to jump. The same thing goes for controlling Mario, he's awful and sluggish in every game I've tried. It seems like a lot of my shoot-em-up games suffer this same fate as well. I've Googled and searched these forums, but there's so many different threads and areas of the site and sooooo many options within the emulator menus that it can be pretty daunting trying to figure this out.

I'm not a stickler about input lag either. I've never seemed to have any trouble on any of my PCs over the last 10+ years when I've played emulators. I was so excited to finally finish my Pi, but damn, any platformer or shooter that I try is pretty much unplayable. I've tried what, I think, seem to be the typical things, enable hard sync, disable multithreaded video, set frame delay (Which only seems to make my games run choppier once you turn it up past the first few notches), etc... I just read that you should run Dispmanx for your video driver and I think that seems to help, although, that could just be a placebo from me reading that it helps. I'm just wondering if there's any other obvious tweaks or settings I'm missing. I find it hard to believe that gamers who build these think this would be acceptable lag, because like I said, lag has never bothered me, but this is making most of my games unbearable to play. This is affecting my NES and SNES games.

I apologize if there's some big, universal thread for this, but I couldn't seem to find much. https://tweakboxx-app.com https://tweakbox-app.net https://tweakboxx.net did find a couple threads, but there was SO MUCH info contained within that I was just kind of lost as to what I should even attempt to change, as far as settings are concerned.

I'm running a Pi Zero v1.3 with the latest version of RetroPi installed, I've tried every SNES emulator that comes with RetroPi and they all seem to have the issue and I'm using a Buffalo Classic USB SNES gamepad, which works terrific with emulators on my PC.

Forgive me if I'm missing an obvious thread, but my search results didn't seem to yield a whole lot other than a couple threads that were just ballooned with tons of different info, tests and lines of code tweaking that it was making my head spin.

thanks my issue has been fixed and I'm not an expert in lag matters but it may depend also from actual Pi hardware you're using. I got a Pi 3 with different controllers (all wired) including the Buffalo classic; I didn't find any noticeable lag.

My understanding from watching various YT reviews of the Mega Drive Mini is that the Mega Pi is slightly smaller but more substantial feeling, so I imagine that would put the kibosh on the "Tower of Power" thing sadly. That said, I noticed that Retroflag recently brought out a nice addition to the SNES version which adds a (purely cosmetic) cartridge to it. I wonder if they're eyeing up the Tower of Power and considering it as a potential future product addition to their Mega Pi? Would be nice if so.

God I love my Mega Pi. I give it a wee cuddle every day you know. It's nothing weird.

Honest.

Thank you very much for this awesome idea.
"Copy all ROMs that have cheevos to a directory."
Can we have a option to move the "cheevonated" (cheevolized? :D) roms to another folder?
And add Cheevos requirements on the cheevos screen?

@chubsta see if you can get hold of the PlayStation Mini console. Two USB PS1 controllers are included (but sadly not the analog ones)

A thousand thank yous! I'm glad I only finished 2 yesterday!

Also - I found where to set the bezel opacity:

~\retropie\configs\arcade\retroarch.cfg

Changed the line

input_overlay_opacity = "0.700000"

to

input_overlay_opacity = "0.400000"

Now I just need to get my spinner working.

Interesting reading. Which systems that the Pi4 can emulate would actually be affected by the read speed that USB2 or SD cards can deliver?

I usually transfer new games from my phone or my PC so my WI/FI and Ethernet speeds would probably be the limiting factor for writing speed for me.

@matchaman I think it should work, but I can't be sure if the final install image won't require a reinstall. As for drivers, those are usually distributed with Raspbian, so if anything gets updated on that part, they'll be automatically installed as part of a normal OS package update.

I should probably just tell you that i did order and received the 2x Tomee NES to USB adapter. They work flawlessly with my two original NES-004E controllers. I have been using them for the past 2 weeks playing top NES games. :-)

I am still waiting for the PSX to USB adapter to arrive. At the moment i have no way of testing my PSX Analog controller.

@pilsnerz said in About the RetroFlag cases! Surprise surprise.... They can cut off power!:

@cyperghost

Just bumping this @cyperghost or if I anyone has ran into this

Just did that to expand into a 256gb SD card. However, if you want to transfer files directly onto the non-boot partition there are two ways I do this. 1) install the desktop environment on your Pi and you can use a keyboard and the file system included in the desktop to transfer files between a USB stick and your SD card. 2) I have an older laptop with a SD card slot and the DVD version of Knoppix installed on it. You can boot the DVD version and use that if you don't want to install it. This can read and write virtually any filesystem in use, including exFAT from your retropie SD card.

EDIT: Note that option #1 is very slow, and option #2 will be slow if you are moving files between an SD card and USB stick plugged into the computer. #2 is much faster if files you are moving to the SD card are on your hard drive.