Lots of little niggles with my Superior console

pescaglini

I got my Retro Pi Superior console for Christmas. Most of the games seem to load fine but I am having the following problems:

PS1 games don’t load at all. You click them and it’ll stay on the small load screen for a few seconds then return to the list?
N64, Dreamcast, Gameboy Advance and PSP Roms are all laggy as hell. (I understand they tell us about N64)

Question is, will and when will this be resolved? I can’t seem to get a straight answer and it’s a little frustrating considering the cost.

Also, once I turn the console off, how do you turn it back on without unplugging the power lead?!

rbaker

@pescaglini said in Lots of little niggles with my Superior console:

Retro Pi Superior console
Most of the games seem to load fine

I am assuming that you have purchased a system? One that is pre-configured with illegal roms? One that cost a lot? If so, you have been scammed. Based on your post, it reads like you are complaining. To whom? If you have purchased a "fully loaded" system, you should know that Retropie is free and what you have been sold is illegal. The seller may have even said get support here! I'm afraid you should go to the scammer and ask for support. Please check https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first and point 5. My advice is to reformat your card with the official image from this site and you can start again. Support is then possible as the good folks on here know and use the official image.

Question is, will and when will this be resolved? I can’t seem to get a straight answer

From who? N64 and Dreamcast will be laggy, its a Pi 3! What do you mean by resolved? Actually, is it a Pi3? you never said.

Also, once I turn the console off, how do you turn it back on without unplugging the power lead?!

The Raspberry Pi is not a console. It's a single board computer that has no on/off switch. It has to be shut sown then powered off by disconnecting the lead unless you elect to fit one of the many excellent power button solutions that are available.

PS1 games don’t load at all. You click them and it’ll stay on the small load screen for a few seconds then return to the list?

PS1 emulation is perfect on Retropie - sounds like you do not have the correct BIOS file. Which of the 3 PS1 emulators are you trying?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but if you paid more than the cost of a Pi kit and SD card, then it's money wasted. There are many people on here in your position I'm afraid.

mediamogul

@pescaglini said in Lots of little niggles with my Superior console:

Also, once I turn the console off, how do you turn it back on without unplugging the power lead?!

One note to this is that the Pi is a low power consumption device. It would only cost $6-$8 dollars to keep it running 24/7 for a full year. While there are several nice options to adding a power switch, I've personally never seen much of a point.

edmaul69

@pescaglini for greatly improving lag, after you select an n64 game, when it says press a button to configure, press a button to go into the configuration and change the emulator to lr-mupen64plus or something like that. To make it a little less pixely look up video smoothing on retropie.

davej

@pescaglini said in Lots of little niggles with my Superior console:

I got my Retro Pi Superior console for Christmas. Most of the games seem to load fine but I am having the following problems:

PS1 games don’t load at all. You click them and it’ll stay on the small load screen for a few seconds then return to the list?

N64, Dreamcast, Gameboy Advance and PSP Roms are all laggy as hell. (I understand they tell us about N64)

Question is, will and when will this be resolved? I can’t seem to get a straight answer and it’s a little frustrating considering the cost.

Also, once I turn the console off, how do you turn it back on without unplugging the power lead?!

As rbaker said, if you've bought a system with retropie illegally preinstalled you'll have to either go back to the people you bought it from for support or start again from scratch by clearing your media and installing software downloaded from this site.

We can't give support for versions of the software you get from anywhere else because we don't know what changes they've made to the system. If we were to suggest things they may even make things worse.

steptoe

Found a link to their website, looks like a PI3 connected to an internal 3.5" hard drive

Trying to look at their image, I'm guessing that's a standard USB power supply not an official PI, so that's providing barely enough to run the PI never mind power an internal hard drive as well. Its basically enough to charge a mobile phone but nothing that needs a stable voltage and current. The power supply may be causing issues as the PI is struggling to run so reducing the CPU speed to cope with the voltage and current drop. Do you get a yellow square in the corner of your screen while trying to play anything, if you do the power supply may be causing your problems

Buy an official PI power supply, more expense but will make a big difference as it will provide the 5v and stable current the PI needs to functional correctly. Cheap USB power supplies in this case just can't cope

There is this one I use :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Raspberry-Pi-Power-adapter-UK/dp/B01CCR5P8U/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_147_bs_tr_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=W7ZB6ZBA92VYYAGZ6Q68

Or, if you want to try it it, this one claims to provide 5v 3A which is more than enough and comes with a neat on/off switch in the lead to solve your on/off problems

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Yuconn-Switch-Charger-Adapter-Raspberry/dp/B071QZB76P/ref=pd_lpo_vtph_147_lp_t_2?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=W7ZB6ZBA92VYYAGZ6Q68

The majority of PS1 games should work straight away, N64 is a different matter as you will realistically need to overclock the PI to get anything to work playing on the N64 which also means learning how to access the OS and edit one file to enable full overclock. The PI3 can take it without damage

I use a PS3 controller and worked pretty much straight away once keys configured

If your fairly tech it might be better, as suggested, to start again from scratch and wipe the SD card to start again and build the image correctly

RetroPi is designed to be as simple as possible and virtually guaranteed to work on the 1st run, there are plenty of tutorials to help and I'm sure a few will try to help you but you'll be much better starting from scratch with a clean image and build your system gradually. Annoying considering how much it costs. That's the problem with 3rd party suppliers making lots of money from software that is basically FREE and supplying ROMs (which is heavily frowned upon and considered illegal on a LOT of forums who won't even bother to entertain your problems just warn you or even ban you)

There is no reason why things should be so laggy and non-functional other than they probably use a standard image and just use the standard emulators without any tailoring. The PI3 benefits massively from overclock and looks like there is plenty of room in the included case to fit a big heatsink on the CPU. The PI3 can take being overclocked and has built-in overclock protection if you push it too far but a heatsink will help a lot to keep it cool, especially in a closed case with a hard drive next to it

Its not an easy answer but the vast majority of 3rd party "ready to go" images such as this cause major headaches for the user. Starting from scratch is probably your easiest answer. You won't lose the the 'data' on your hard drive but you will need to tell RetroPi about the connected hard drive once/if you create a clean image

This link is probably the most simple, and explains each step in detail with images. This is assuming you wish to start from zero

https://howchoo.com/g/n2qyzdk5zdm/build-your-own-raspberry-pi-retro-gaming-rig

Once you've done that, to allow retropie to access the hard drive 'data' you need to carry out the follow. Assuming they have created the folders correctly it should mount everything fine, BUT you may also have to install the emulators manually. More work, but at the end of it you WILL have a system that actually works then you can fire off complaints to your supplier and suggest how crap they are

First Update the RetroPie Setup Script
Re-Enable the USB ROM Transfer Service
Plug your hard drive back into the Raspberry Pi

It will proceed to automatically copy the RetroPie folder AND all of its contents (you may need to reboot to start the copying)

NOTE if you have a large ROM collection already on the SD card it will copy all of the ROMs too so make sure your USB is large enough. It is easiest if you haven't added any roms yet.

Once the folder structure is copied over the USB will be mounted over the RetroPie folder so any ROMs you add to your pi will be run off of the USB.

Disable the USB ROM Transfer Service

Reboot your system, everything should now be where it should be

Or, you could always complain to the suppliers and quote distance selling regulations suggesting its not fit for purpose and return it for a full refund or get THEM to fix their badly set-up system

pescaglini

Thank you all so much for your replies, especially Steptoe, some great advice there dude so thank you for taking the time.

It’s strange that the supplier put me in contact with this forum as if it was specifically for their own product. Although I am learning with PI and the builds, I am pretty tech savvy so no doubt I can rectify these problems with the advice given and some time researching.

Thanks again guys!

herb_fargus

@pescaglini said in Lots of little niggles with my Superior console:

It’s strange that the supplier put me in contact with this forum as if it was specifically for their own product

Not strange, lazy and greedy are the words youre looking for.

steptoe

I have to agree, their website forum shows zero replies and zero support

I'd guess that they might have even just downloaded a pre-built image with all systems on it (there are plenty of these if you search but again cause headaches as they have been pre-built for content not quality) and downloaded as many ROMs as possible or even got a 3rd party hard drive (which again are well known for causing major headaches as its just a huuuge collection with no real testing or problem solving) and spent a bit of time creating an image and just cloning the hard drive then just shoving it all together in a package to make a nice profit

Leave comments on their FaceBook page, that usually gets a quick response, especially if its negative. Nothing too slanderous. Just referring to the amount of money it cost, doesn't work as advertised, zero after care support, referring you elsewhere as they may not have a clue

I have also a HyperSpin set-up on a Windows system, when I eventually get around to finishing my table top arcade and transfer it across as I also wanted pinball support and the more modern console support such as Wii but the PI just isn't powerful enough to even begin emulating those. It has a lot of systems and games and that caused me a LOT of time and effort to get it running as it should be and making sure everything works. You can also buy 3rd party HyperSpin disks full to the limit with stuff but no real order or checking and are well known to cause BIG problems for the unlucky person who believed it was just plug 'n' play, which is what may be the case here, plus as with RetroPie the creators of HyperSpin are far from happy about their software being distributed illegally and others making a profit from their hard work along with all the grief they get when people try to get support from them after being sold a rubbish product in good faith

In the end it will probably much quicker and also you get to know how RetroPie works to start with a fresh image and build it from the ground up installing the simpler systems first. MAME is a good one, get the wrong ROM set with the wrong emulator for that ROM set and most if not all will refuse to work. DOS games are another as they are pretty much all keyboard. You can map keys to joypads but not everything

That standard USB charger is a bad point, cheap and cheerful. Definitely the first thing to go and get the official PI one

I started off with RetroPi only but had the idea of getting KODi working in another separate system. I now have KODI 18 running RetroPi with a USB 1TB portable hard drive (after somebody did a lot of work getting RetroPie to run via KODI), all powered off an official PI supply. It all works great with zero issues, overclocked and running very cool at no more than 45c on a heavy session and now attached to the back of the TV all hidden. Wireless remote that controls the KODI and keyboard so I can access RetroPIe if I need to, USB PS3 controllers plugged in. Best of both, media player and retro gaming plus 42" TV. Wasn't quick to understand what was what and how Linux does things, but it works and included all the games the majority of people want to play including the usual PS1, Aracde, N64, SNES, NeoGeo and so on for the most popular consoles of their time. I put the time and effort in and this set-up works for me

chubsta

@pescaglini said in Lots of little niggles with my Superior console:

Thank you all so much for your replies, especially Steptoe, some great advice there dude so thank you for taking the time.

It’s strange that the supplier put me in contact with this forum as if it was specifically for their own product. Although I am learning with PI and the builds, I am pretty tech savvy so no doubt I can rectify these problems with the advice given and some time researching.

Thanks again guys!

You know, there are so many similar posts around here from people in your situation, people buy a pre-made system that doesn't work right and come here expecting to be spoon-fed. But what is really, and I mean REALLY refreshing here, is your attitude - sure, you have been sold a bit of a pup but you seem to have the attitude that you will be able to learn and fix it, instead of just complaining and expecting people to jump through unreasonable hoops to help you out.

A Pi running Retropie is a wonderful thing, so hopefully you will be able to get everything sorted easily enough, it sounds like you are willing to learn so 'welcome', and thanks for cheering me up with your positivity!