The Most Advanced System You Have Seen A Retro Pie Run?
-
@philman716 quake 3 arena runs great on a pi. Probably the most advanced game I have seen.
-
@quicksilver For me it's also Quake III Arena. It runs incredibly smoothly. We definitely need more games like this playable on Pi. Perhaps Unreal Tournament should be similar in terms of system requirements? Or some of the Carmageddon PC games? There's also one simple yet awesome game I'd like to run on Pi which is called Ballance. Unfortunately I've no idea how to make other fancy games to run, other than that are placed in optional packages in retropie setup.
I hope that Pi 4 will be powerful enough to handle all consoles that are unplayable as of now (e.g. PSP, N64, Dreamcast, PS2 to name a few).
-
People vastly underestimate the amount of computing power required, and vastly overestimate what things like the RPi are capable of, while also having the RPi already being unusually powerful for such a low-power board.
General rule: If you don't have the source codes, then the people writing the game would have to write a Raspberry Pi version.
Quake and Unreal have both had published source codes, I believe. It still takes a LOT of work to convert to other systems, but that means it's at least possible.
If not, and the owners of the software wanted, they have access to the source, so they could make a version themselves but you're at their mercy. Think "Minecraft for Raspberry Pi". They can make a version for you, but that's all you get. And nobody else can.
Everything else is "emulation" - i.e. pretending to be a computer you're not and running the original unmodified program, which is intensively draining on any system (even emulating an "old" slow system uses a surprising amount of computer power... you can easily use 10-100 times the power of a system in order to emulate it... that 3.5MHz ZX Spectrum probably takes 35-350MHz at least to emulate, even in the best cases). Take the minimum system resources, multiply by 10-100, that's the kind of machine you need if you don't have the source.
The most powerful you do on an RPi is emulate a high-end system like an N64 or whatever.
Anything else requires source code or an explicit port. Ballance won't happen - isn't that a Windows game? Carmageddon - same, unless the owners step up and make an RPi version or release the source code (even then, it'll be a year or two after that most likely!).
To be powerful enough to do Dreamcast, PS2, ... you're going to need a machine maybe twice as fast as an RPi3, and maybe with a 2-5x faster graphics processor on it (which is the real killer on any 3D console - the RPi one isn't all that powerful at all). Minimum specs for a Dreamcast emulator are something like dual core Intel processor @ 3.0 GHZ, 512 MB RAM, DirectX11-level graphics. That's not gonna happen in an RPi 4. Just the processors alone would double the power-usage of the Raspberry Pi and you'd be into needing 5-6A power adaptors.
N64 might become playable on RPi in the next few years. That's about as close as you'll get.
-
@ledow Thank you for the clarification. I have to disagree with one thing as I'm pretty sure the Quake III Arena version we play is rather a PC version than written specifically for RPi. I did some files swap recently - copied data from my CD and unlocked full version.
As for the Ballance - yes it's a Windows game and I was pretty sure it won't run on RPi under any circumstances. I think Carmageddon 1 and 2 should run well with the use of DOSbox - I'd have to test these.
-
I am not sure how to interpret "Advanced System". Quake 3 Arena is used as stress testing for over clocked systems and that have its reason. It is a system hungry exhaustive game, which brings your machine to its limits. But does that mean advanced?
Joke: The most advanced system on my RPi3B is the Neo Geo AES, which stands for Advanced Entertainment System. 😉
-
@thelostsoul Quake III Arena runs smoothly on my Pi 3B+ which is not overclocked. I've tested it for around 30 minutes and had no single issue with it.
-
@Carnivore Non overclocked shouldn't be a problem. I meant if you overclock your system, then Quake 3 will use all of its resources and it might over heat. The game just uses as much resources your system has. Thats why I asked previously if that means advanced? It just stresses the cpu and gpu to its limits, as no frame cap is active.
-
@ledow said in The Most Advanced System You Have Seen A Retro Pie Run?:
To be powerful enough to do Dreamcast, PS2, ... you're going to need a machine maybe twice as fast as an RPi3, and maybe with a 2-5x faster graphics processor on it (which is the real killer on any 3D console - the RPi one isn't all that powerful at all). Minimum specs for a Dreamcast emulator are something like dual core Intel processor @ 3.0 GHZ, 512 MB RAM, DirectX11-level graphics. That's not gonna happen in an RPi 4. Just the processors alone would double the power-usage of the Raspberry Pi and you'd be into needing 5-6A power adaptors.
N64 might become playable on RPi in the next few years. That's about as close as you'll get.
I agree that ps2 emulation is going to be out of reach for SBC's for a long time but isn't Dreamcast emulation already pretty good on other SBC's that are only a bit more powerful than the pi? The odroid for example.
-
@Carnivore said in The Most Advanced System You Have Seen A Retro Pie Run?:
@ledow I have to disagree with one thing as I'm pretty sure the Quake III Arena version we play is rather a PC version than written specifically for RPi.
No... it's a port. From the original PC source code. That's not the same. You can't run the "PC version" on the ARM processor at all. It's a recompile (which is what's possible when you have the source). Guess what the "Ports" category on RetroPie was originally intended for?
Notice that means that it's therefore directly running ARM code (you couldn't take that RPi port of Quake and run it on a PC), and thus optimised for an ARM processor, which is why it works as fast as it does. Anything without source, you can't do that.
If you have source, you can compile for the Raspberry Pi (with a lot of work).
If you don't have source, you are into emulation, which is incredibly slow. Hence, crudely, emulating an N64 - which has a 93.7MHz chip - will not run as well as something like Quake 3 that's been compiled/ported to the 1.4GHz (~1400Mhz) chip in the RPi 3B. Roughly, If you had N64 Quake 3 rom and ran it in an emulator alongside the ported Quake 3, the ported Quake 3 will perform nearly 10 times better (in terms of framerate, resolution, detail etc.). The N64, for instance, is also not emulated accurately because to do so would mean an awful slowdown - you can kill even a top of the line PC with just MAME emulating a 90's arcade game "accurately".
Source: I'm a programmer. I port code. I write emulators. Have done since I was a child 30 years ago.
Until you get into literally PC-performance (i.e. dozens of cores, running at several GHz each, with memory and buses to support them fully, and a graphic card capable of extremes of graphics capability), you won't get much past N64. Even on a modern PC, emulating Dreamcast, PS2, Wii, etc. are at the higher ends of what you can do.
-
@Carnivore I can get the following Dreamcast games running well enough on reicast that I felt I could include them in my bartop arcade: Marvel vs Capcom 2, Crazy Taxi 1&2, Daytona 500, Virtua Fighter 3tb
-
@ledow I understand it now, thank you for clarification. That's too bad we won't get a machine (not talking about PC) anytime soon to emulate both N64 and Dreamcast well enough for them to be as playable as on original consoles. I guess for newer titles you would just have to go for new generation consoles such as PS4 or so and play newer versions of each N64 game, if such exists.
But what I hate about all this new console stuff is that you can no longer play as easily as you could do it back in the days. Internet is a must for nearly everything, micropayments everywhere even though you bought a full version of the game. And controllers are already a mess in my opinion since PS2 - nothing like the ones for SNES with just couple keys necessary to play. I get it where they come from but I still feel much more comfortable with my good old RetroPad.
@BJRetro Thanks. I'll look into these when I get time. At the moment I'm going through the N64 library with poor results so far but still there are couple playable games already.
Contributions to the project are always appreciated, so if you would like to support us with a donation you can do so here.
Hosting provided by Mythic-Beasts. See the Hosting Information page for more information.