LibRetro not yet ready for Ubuntu 18.04

[Neo-Rio]

I tried retropie again on a laptop using nvidia graphics and non-free nvidia driver.
Libretro games worked but the nvidia non-free additional driver caused system instability and the system would eventually crash

[BuZz]

On my desktop PC with 18.04 Xubuntu using Intel integrated graphics and xorg, everything seems to work fine. Unfortunately I am unable to reproduce the problems on this thread.

[sabrecheeky]

@buzz

I am running a udoo x86 hobby board, with Ubuntu MATE. Everything ran fine in retropie under 17.10, but my upgrade to 18.04 has broken it. It freezes right at the start of the game emulation - the controller indicator in the bottom left of the screen is still there, and I can sometimes get to a splash screen, but it is rarely running more than a fraction of a second. Wayland is not an option in the MATE desktop, iirc. Anyone found any other fixes?

[mitu]

@sabrecheeky said in LibRetro not yet ready for Ubuntu 18.04:

Anyone found any other fixes?

Change the RetroArch video driver to gl or sdl and try again.

[esmith13]

@mitu said in LibRetro not yet ready for Ubuntu 18.04:

@sabrecheeky said in LibRetro not yet ready for Ubuntu 18.04:

Anyone found any other fixes?

Change the RetroArch video driver to gl or sdl and try again.

That temp fix works for Lubuntu as well (which does not have wayland support) but unfortunately does not allow shader use.

[sabrecheeky]

@mitu Thanks - That got it going for now! (Although it still has a random 'bug' which causes the desktop to change the audio settings from HDMI to built in audio, which does not exist. - I thought this was a 17.10/pulseaudio thing - shame upgrading hasn't fixed it.)

Thanks again for your (incredibly swift) reply and help!

[mitu]

@sabrecheeky It wasn't me that suggested this, but a another forum user, I'm just using his/her suggestion. For curiosity, which setting worked for you ?

[sabrecheeky]

@mitu sdl2. Just playing round with it, I seem to losing parts of the display from the top and bottom in gba, psx and spectrum emulators I've quickly tried - can't seem to be able to fix that (My TV says the display is changing to 'VGA' - ah, the memories!) Also, I can't use my keyboard in the spectrum (lr-fuse) - although that could be unrelated to the driver. I'll keep messing about, see what I can find in the meantime!

[Neo-Rio]

How do we change the retroarch video driver anyways? Is there an easy way? Just a config file to edit?

[mitu]

@neo-rio You can edit the global retroarch.cfg file or use the configuration editor and change the video driver - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Configuration-Editor/.

[praetorian55]

I'm a bit late to the party but thanks to this discussion I was able to get my dedicated build working with the Sway window manager and Wayland in ubuntu server 18.04 after having trouble with X

That said, I accidently went back into X last night and was surprised that it worked! The only change I had made was updating retroarch and cores to the latest builds (manually copying them to the retropie folders) in order to use the runahead feature. Figured I would share in case anyone was still having issues with 18.04 and x86 retropie

[mitu]

@praetorian55 1.7.3 is installable from RetroPie now - albeit from source. Which video card do you have installed ?

[praetorian55]

@mitu said in LibRetro not yet ready for Ubuntu 18.04:

@praetorian55 1.7.3 is installable from RetroPie now - albeit from source. Which video card do you have installed ?

Awesome, that makes it easier to manage - I was just excited to try out the runahead feature in 1.7.2 and 1.7.3 and saw the x86/18.04 problem people were experiencing seemed to be fixed.

I'm working with Intel hd4000 integrated graphics.

[thelostsoul]

@praetorian55 Thank you for reporting this. As I will not switch to Wayland soon, I hope it gets working with X. So, you gave me hope. :-)

[parasven]

Last week i dist-upgraded from ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 without problem.
When the upgradeprocess was finished i used the retropie setup script to recompile everything.

After recompiling everything ran as if nothing had happened.

Hardware:
i5 7600k
Nvidia GTX 1050ti

[sabrecheeky]

I tried upgrading again after reading this, but still no joy. I get a fatal error trying to build libretro from Retropie-Setup.

The offending lines of the log are as follows:

**In file included from ./libretro-common/include/glsym/rglgen.h:32:0,
from ./libretro-common/include/glsym/glsym.h:26,
from gfx/drivers_context/../common/gl_common.h:37,
from gfx/drivers_context/x_ctx.c:44:
./libretro-common/include/glsym/rglgen_headers.h:27:10: fatal error: EGL/egl.h: No such file or directory
#include <EGL/egl.h>
^~~~~~~~~~~
compilation terminated.
Makefile:191: recipe for target 'obj-unix/release/gfx/drivers_context/x_ctx.o' failed
make: *** [obj-unix/release/gfx/drivers_context/x_ctx.o] Error 1
make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
input/drivers_joypad/udev_joypad.c:533:12: warning: ‘sort_devnodes’ defined but not used [-Wunused-function]
static int sort_devnodes(const void a, const void b)
^~~~~~~~~~~~~
~
Could not successfully build retroarch - RetroArch - frontend to the libretro emulator cores - required by all lr- emulators (/home/scot/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/retroarch/retroarch not found).

Log ended at: Fri 18 May 15:43:48 BST 2018
Total running time: 0 hours, 1 mins, 54 secs*

Any Ideas?!? I am running Ubuntu mate 18.04 on a udoo x86 hobby board. (everything ran fine under 17.10)

[mitu]

@sabrecheeky Please open a new topic, you have another problem than the one reported in this topic. Make sure you include the relevant information asked in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

[Neo-Rio]

I recently updated 18.04 with the latest patches and rebuild retropie from the latest config file. Still having issues under Xorg.
The problem must be gl rendering. I tried all the other video drivers. Only sdl2 displayed anything. The others wouldn't start up. SDL2 looked like a hot mess with a squished image and sides being cut off. In the case of gl, well... that's the default and doesn't work.

If the latest retroarch fixes the display issue then I'm all for upgrading to that from the install script.

[pinguy]

This is a bit hacky but until the devs find a fix for Ubuntu 18.04 Xorg this will work for now.

Install weston.

sudo apt install weston

Than create a script that will run weston with RetroArch within Xorg.

#!/bin/bash
weston --width=1280 --height=720 --fullscreen & p1=$!
retroarch & p2=$!

wait -n
[ "$?" -gt 1 ] || kill "$p1" "$p2"
wait

Change width and height to your screen resolution than save it somewhere and point /usr/share/applications/RetroArch to the script or create a new launcher.

To stop weston from putting the screen to sleep add this to ~/.config/weston.ini

[core]
idle-time=0

With this script I run emulationstation instead. As emulationstation is running within weston when it launches retroarch it also runs under weston. But it should work with any frontend.

EDIT#
Here is a real fix. No need to run RetroArch within weston.

The issue seems to be due to Ubuntu using DRI3 as default for Xorg. For older graphic cards you may have to use DRI2.

To see what you are using run:

xdpyinfo | grep DRI

If its DRI3 changing it to DRI2 may fix the problem.

For ATI cards pre-vulkan run.

sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-radeon.conf

and paste this into it save and exit:

Section "OutputClass"
    Identifier "Radeon"
    MatchDriver "radeon"
    Driver "radeon"
    Option "DRI" "2"
    Option "TearFree" "on"
    Option "AccelMethod" "glamor"
EndSection

F3 will save the file and Ctrl+X will exit nano.

Than kill X or reboot.

Unsure if this will work with newer ATI cards. You may have to change "DRI" "2" to "DRI" "3"

Same deal with intel but instead of 10-radeon.conf its 20-intel.conf.

sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

If DRI 2 doesn't work try 3.

Section "Device"
  Identifier  "Intel Graphics"
  Driver      "intel"
  Option      "DRI" "2"
  Option      "TearFree" "true"
  Option      "AccelMethod"  "uxa"
EndSection

Just remember after making changes to the .conf you need to kill X or reboot for the changes to take effect.

If you are unable to boot back into the system. Boot the live ISO and delete /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ 20-intel.conf or 10-radeon.conf.

[thelostsoul]

I want to report RetroArch from Snap-Store does work in Ubuntu 18.04 with Xorg out of the box. So anybody want test this out, please report back.