Pi Zero experiences
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Thats pretty good for a 5$ device imho. I really wonder if the Zero could replace a desktop in office since you'll only need internet, text editor, webbrowser and a printer in an office working environment. Could save probably thousands of $$$.
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Thanks for the tip regarding SNES sound. Recently picked up a few zero boards with the intention on making a slimmed down version of my RPi3 only containing 16-bit and lower systems. I may even add a few PSX games per your recommendation.
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@Blesseddisciple said in Pi Zero experiences:
I tried to play n64 games to absolutely no avail.
See here You need a Pi 2 minimum and even then it's hit and miss.
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Over the holidays I built 18x Pi Zero's for my 18 cousins (in monetary collaboration with my aunt and uncles ;) and while I agree the Pi Zero is an amazing deal at $5 (which the true cost is really ~$14 for those in the USA not living near a Micro Center store, FYI + adapter dongles...), my experiences are quite a bit different than yours.
I find the Zero's stutter, and struggle running at 100% speed even on measly Nintendo 8-bit games. If you've ever run them side by side with a real Nintendo, or even a Raspberry Pi 3 (I've compared them both ways), you'll see what I mean. I will definitely try your sound fix however - the sound stuttering could most definitely be exaggerating my perceived slowdown of the gameplay itself (since the sound is definitely what I notice the most).
When you move on up to 16-bit SNES games the (I guess it's the framerate?) slows down even more. I only have a small handful of real SNES games to compare it to (like 6), but they sure don't play as smooth on the Zero as they do on a real SNES console. I found Sega Genesis/Megadrive to be very good just like you - maybe 90-95% slowdown on occasion. I never tried Playstation like you did as if it can just barely handle 8 and 16-bit Nintendo at full speed I figured there's absolutely no hope for PSX.
I was however surprised at it's ability to play Doom and Quake. Think I tried it through both Ports, and DOSBox and it was pretty darn good.
My biggest disappointment is the shaders, specifically CRT-Pi which I fell in love with on my Pi 3. It just looks horrible on the Zero on most of the games. I need to mess with this some more (made a forum topic about it and everything) but it seems to be that the Zero's stock settings have a different resolution than the Pi 3 does since the Zero needs the slight speed boost from rendering at a lower resolution....which in turn messes up the CRT-Pi shader (in theory of course ;)
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@PetroRie I can see this if you use a terminal server or a cloud provider for your IT infrastructure in the office. As long as you pay less for these services than stocking your office with fully fledged PC's, the Pi0 would be about as cheap of a thin client terminal as you can get.
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@Blesseddisciple Hey there. I mainly grabbed a Pi Zero so I could build those funky NES Pi Cartridge systems. I have been also testing systems for the last 4 weeks. To be honest, I didn't even give the PSX a try because I honestly didn't expect it to run. Now that you are stating they can run at good frame rates, I might give this a try. Would you mind giving me a list of games you have success running?
With that said, I did get a fair amount of systems running. I got several Arcade games running, that I didn't expect would run. For example, Aliens Vs Predator runs beautifully. But only the one that comes in the rom set for FBA (via emu). Even with that rom set, I had to test the games in lr-fba, PiFba and Mame4all because they'll run them differently, even not at all. It took me days to get through many of those games. I even got TMNT turtles in time and The Simpsons running well.
Another system I got running was Neo-Geo. Not all roms but a good amount. PiFBA and Neo Geo bios work excellent together.
I have also had many of the Sega CD games running well but they eat up so much space and many of those games aren't that great. I might just toss in the Sonic games for kicks.
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@Blesseddisciple And thanks for creating this topic. It's not often folks consider the Pi Zero when testing certain aspects of Retropie.
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Quick question.
I have the same issues regarding sound with both SNES and NES, but strangely Sega Genesis works perfectly. I'd like to try adjusting the sound frequency to fix it as was stated above, but where to I look the change that? Do I need to edit a config file? If so which one? Or can I do it from the runcommand menu? If so where do I look for it? Thanks in advance. -
Think I found the answer. For those with the same issue I believe its located in '/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg' Just edited the line 'audio_out_rate = 48000' to something lower. I tried 22500 and 11250 but after reboots neither helped. So I instead installed QuickNES Nintendo Emulator to fix the NES sound issue and installed PiSNES to fix the SNES Sound. Both of those seemed to get the job done for me. I can't play SuperFX games such as Star Fox on PiSNES unfortunately, but everything else seems to work just fine.
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Bringing back a dead thread. Has anyone had more luck with using a Zero or Zero W for RetroPie? I want to get a second Pi for gaming, the one I have has been turned into an openHAB box, so I was looking for a cheap way to do it. I would have to dl the new RetroPie as the one I have is over a year old and has been sitting on a stored away microSD card for over a year.
I would like to play PSX games if possible, so I might have to get a pi3, but if I can do it on a Zero, that would be great. We will be mostly playing 16-bit and older games.
I also haven't used a Zero for anything yet, just a couple pi3's, so if there are any other issues with them, please let me know.
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