nice job with n64

mediamogul

Someone managed to perfect Nintendo 64 emulation? How long was I asleep? Did the 'Fast and the Furious' franchise ever finish its trilogy of films?

DarishZone

Uh oh, tell me more

mediamogul

@darishzone

Nintendo 64 emulation isn't particularly strong on any system. Even when it looks passable, there's a lot going unnoticed that will effect game play. To be fair though, the OP was speaking of implementation into RetroPie and to that he does have a point. A lot of consideration was made in how defaults were set to assure as smooth an experience as possible, considering the limitations of the Pi.

DarishZone

Thanks for the clarification, I was referring to the topic starter, because excluded Mario Kart and Super Mario 64, I was not able to run decently anything. There's something new i should know?

mediamogul

@darishzone

From what I understand, the developer has had a lot of trouble supporting the Pi's older GPU and its OpenGL ES 2.0 requirement. At one point he was considering dropping support altogether, but there are a few developers helping to add continued support as it needs it. Outside of certain early titles like the ones you mentioned, performance can be lacking. Of course, there's always those that'll surprise you. Last I tried, 'DOOM 64' ran very well for example.

DarishZone

I'm very interested about Doom 64, last time it crashed, but don't remember what emulator i used. Cane you provide me some info?

mediamogul

@darishzone

It's been over a year since I tested it, so results may vary, but I was using mupen64plus with the glide plugin.

quicksilver

@darishzone it will crash using mupen-glide, lr-mupen64 runs doom 64 great though.

There are a lot of N64 games that run well on a pi 3. Just requires a fair amount of tweaking.

DarishZone

Do you know some recent list?

quicksilver

@darishzone just the list that's in my head :)

I have thought about making an updated list but there are so many variables and mupen64 is updated from time to time so most lists get inaccurate fairly quickly.

mediamogul

@quicksilver

Times have changed. Last I tried lr-mupen64, it would hardly run anything due to the overhead introduced by RetroArch. Still, N64 emulation under ideal conditions is well below what I would consider acceptable. With all the small graphical, audio and timing issues that add up, the games generally feel incomplete to me.

KN4THX

Last time I went through the compatibility lost to set up more games to my collection, I noticed many games were listed as 'Stable' but no matter what settings or emulator I tried I could not even get to a 'playabke' status. One that comes to mind is Nightmare Creatures. Other games I swear worked when I first started playing the the N64 on an earlier Pi no longer work as well. I played Mario Kart 64 on my cousin's Pi I set up for him a long while back, which is never updated, and it seemed to play noticeably better than what I play on my current 3B+ setup. It's funny how things change for the better and the worse as things get better overall. I really hope the next Pi has VC5 support more than anything as it does so much already with so little.

Brigane

@darishzone I know this probably ain't the same thing as playing it on a N64 emulator but, what you could do is install Doom 64 Retribution Mod in the "Ports" Section. It works quite brilliant from there.

Ranma

@mediamogul said in nice job with n64:

@quicksilver

Times have changed. Last I tried lr-mupen64, it would hardly run anything due to the overhead introduced by RetroArch.

Yeah it's definitely much better now. In fact it's my main N64 emu on the Pi. What with the improvements made to it and the GPU overclock settings recently posted here, though it's not perfect it is certainly good enough that it puts a big smile on my face. :-) All my favourite stuff works extremely well on the Pi3.

DarishZone

@ranma Can you provide some titles which works good? I am concerned about some results provided on Github list.

BobHarris

@darishzone The games that I play frequently and run very well (non overclocked) are Doom 64, Wipeout 64, Super Mario 64 and Mario kart 64. I do play all of them on a lower resolution. I only use the libretro emulator for Wipeout 64 (didn't even ran on non libretro core).
It's all a matter of trial and error.
I don't have the latest N64 build so my experiences may differ from others.
I get best results with mupen64plus-gles2n64 at 720x576.

DarishZone

@bobharris Thank you, i'm interested on that list, will make a try.

quicksilver

@darishzone first read through this guide https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Optimization-for-Nintendo-64

Over clocking does make a very noticeable difference with performance it will make a lot of marginally playable games run very smoothly. Specifically core_freq. Also read the section on audio as it has a tweak that will smooth out audio issues.

Here is a short list of popular titles that I have running perfectly or near perfectly on my pi:

1080 snowboarding - lr-mupen64plus
Diddy Kong racing - glide
Wave race - rice
Mario64 - gles2n64
Mario kart - gles2n64
Mario party 2 - glide
Hydro thunder - gles2n64
Crusin world - gles2n64
Zelda OOT - rice
Majora's mask - rice
Battle tanx - glide

A bunch of others too but I can't remember their settings off my head.

DarishZone

Thanks, are those good without overclock?

quicksilver

@darishzone some of them are ok without overclock. But for best performance overclocking core_freq really makes a big difference.