Reicast vs lr-reicast perfomance

mitu

@Febbweiss said in Reicast vs lr-reicast perfomance:

I don't understand why the libretro version is slow and not the reicast version which works pretty well. I thought the libretro version was a fork of reicast with some improvements...

It might very well be, but the improvements need also a more powerful system. The Raspberry PI is not powerful enough to benefit from those improvements.

barbudreadmon

@Febbweiss said in Reicast vs lr-reicast perfomance:

I use them on a Raspberry pi 3.

You are misunderstanding 2 important things :

first, reicast doesn't run well at all on rpi3, it's just frameskipping a ton, trying to keep the whole thing at a playable level, that still sucks to play a game at 20~30 fps when original hardware was running at 60 fps, to enable similar behavior in lr-reicast i think you need to set "Framerate" to "normal" in the core options ("fullspeed", which is the default, won't skip a single frame iirc).
second, improvement is different from faster, lr-reicast is more accurate, with less graphical glitch and other crashes, ending up being slower. It also has pretty good support for naomi games.

Edit : and you want to enable "threaded rendering" too for lr-reicast, which is the default behavior in reicast, but not for lr-reicast, because it's causing some latency.

ninuzzu

Hi, today I compiled lr-reicast with my rpi3 B+ and it compiled.
I then tried to launch a game (from terminal ) with:
/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-reicast/reicast_libretro.so --config /opt/retropie/configs/dreamcast/retroarch.cfg "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/dreamcast/dolphinblue.lst"

But it refuses to load. If I run the same command with SSH (using Putty) I can play the game....weird....
The log tells me there's a segmentation error . Any help??

Tested different games (Dreamcast, Naomi GD-ROMS, Atomiswave2Naomi) they all work when I launch them from Putty.....
Good thing is that with those settings above I was enjoying Dolphin Blue and First of the North Star, both Atomiswave games.

BJRetro

@ninuzzu I am not sure if this will work or not but did you do this by any chance:

type sudo nano /opt/retropie/configs/dreamcast/emulators.cfg
You will see a line that says lr-reicast= and at the very end of the line inside the last quotation mark put </dev/null

If not, maybe try? Not sure if it will help as I am not running lr-reicast from command line, I am using emulation station.

I also saw you are running a .lst file as your game in your command and I don’t use that either.

ninuzzu

@BJRetro Thank you so much, that worked, now I can test some Naomi games :)
The .lst comes from Atomiswave2Naomi converted games (e.g.: MetalSlug 6): those are playable in lr-reicast.
I'm using emulation station too, but it wasn't working (showing that error in the log), so I tried from the terminal and then from SSH ;)
Why lr-reicast is not included in Retropie? I couldn't find it, so I had to compile it.

BJRetro

@ninuzzu that’s pretty amazing you figured out how to do it yourself. I just found out recently we could run it on pi and had to follow some folks’ instructions. I bet it will be added again soon because a bunch of us tested it now. I think originally the moderators barred it from the retropie setup menu for pi (though not x86) because there was a time when it didn’t run at all on pi, but apparently improvements have been made that allow it to run pretty good now. Thanks for filling me in on the .lst format will have to take a look at that!

BuZz

@BJRetro yep. It didn't used to work. I'll review adding it for the RPI.

sirhenrythe5th

Wow, im impressed and like the idea of improving existing Software as far as no Hardware will be improved this year concerning the Pi 4.

What does "Metal Slug 6 is playable" mean?
Does it run with issues - but runs, or are we talking about a similar performance of Atomiswave like Metal Slug 1-5 for FBA?

Anyway: great work and news of the week, thx a lot.

ninuzzu

@sirhenrythe5th I only tested the first stage: game is playable but has some black screens here and there. Anyway, you can play Metal Slug 6 and 7 (called Metal Slug XX) with PSP emulator, they run great!

sirhenrythe5th

@ninuzzu thank a lot for that Info! Got both parts ready to go as i also have a good old PSP Fat (ceramic white) with the legendary custom firmware by dark Alex.
I am looking forward for accurate emulation of PSP and Dreamcast/Naomi for the Pi in the Future.
We are pretty close imo ☺

barbudreadmon

@ninuzzu said in Reicast vs lr-reicast perfomance:

I only tested the first stage: game is playable but has some black screens here and there

iirc that's because you use the deprecated lst format, maybe the deprecated naomi_boot.bin bios too. nowaday lr-reicast supports proper mame dumps, including bioses (different game use different bios, in the case of atomiswave games you'll need awbios.zip). You should read posts starting at https://retropie.org.uk/forum/post/180870 .

BuZz

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/pull/2644

odd it segfaults without redirecting stdin - note I've not tested the PR - I did test building it on the RPI but the PR may need some changes.

BJRetro

@BuZz yay for possibly getting this back implemented into the setup script! Although I already have it manually, I think this will lead to great testing and performance improvements from messing with the retroarch options from lots of testers. The other thing I wonder is if this is implemented does it make sense (if possible)for the script to automatically add .zip, .ZIP, as a recognized extension for the Dreamcast system in the config for people who will use lr-reicast for Naomi / Atomiswave rather than people having to do that manually? (Note, I don’t know how hard what I am asking to do is so take that for what it’s worth).

2Play

i have compiled manually today from github https://github.com/libretro/reicast-emulator (platform=rpi3 make).
Compiled ok and provided core.
Added lines in emulator.cfg created retroarch.cfg in /configs/dreamcast and added core options.
With the </dev/null boots fine cdi rom from within ES. Without no.
Power Stone boots smooth very slight sound cracks but more when fight begins.

I think needs little more testing on the core settings and possible OC but I testing as is on Pi3B

PS wont compile with retropie script module

Gwyllion

Still no widescreen, right? hardcoded...