retropie for the PI4 ????

[DOPatrick]

@matchaman so why do people build retro gaming machines from a PI with retropi is its not used for that?

[obsidianspider]

@sirhenrythe5th said in retropie for the PI4 ????:

"community" 😂
I have the idea he is talking about these US-Facebook-Groups.

You mean the people selling fully loaded consoles and profiting off the work of others?

[Niejeden]

@DOPatrick Well... It's cheap, portable, small, can fit in handheld case or case resembling real retro-consoles... Also, for emulating 8-bit computers and most 16-bit consoles (NES/SNES/MegaDrive etc.) it's more than enough.

[Clyde]

@DOPatrick said in retropie for the PI4 ????:

BTW … why and how should I set up my buttons. seems a lot of different designs are out there

Ask ten people and you'll get 15+ answers – at least. It heavily depends on your personal preferences, the systems you want to emulate, and the games you want to play. Just search the forum for "button layout" and you'll find many discussions about this matter. On the rest of the web, this guide is very comprehensive, verging on making a science of it.

As @mitu suggested, you should open more threads separated by topic for your questions other than the release date of Retropie for the Pi 4.

Welcome to this forum and your new hobby. ;)

[sirhenrythe5th]

@obsidianspider well, at least they dont do that kind of stuff. It is not allowed to sell things there, but the main topic in these groups is "gimme a link to a premade image" or problems they have with those prebuilt images.
I also realised that it seems to be an american phenomen, all these images are from US-Users for US-Users, not a single one from Finland, Bulgaria or Spain :D
Maybe it is about the convinience which is a compnoent of the american way of life.
But as mentioned: at least they dont sell anything there.

[ledow]

The next version of MESA (scheduled for early December) contains a proper OpenGL ES 3.1 driver for the VideoCore on the RPi4. At that point, mesa will be pushed to distros. At that point, it'll end up in raspbian. At that point, it might be worth recompiling a handful of the compilers to actually do something that they can't already do (shader-stuff it looks like). At that point, there's about 50 different programs that may want a recompile, test, etc.

As a small example, I just got Supermariowar working fullscreen on RPi4 with SDL2, because you basically have to convert the code to work on SDL2 because now the graphics driver requires X libraries in the background (from what it looks like, anyway). It was a handful of changes and a bit of fiddling but it all needs to be done and tested for even a project as long-running as smw.

Multiply that up to an emulator that's pushing the boundaries of things, trying to use shaders to push the hard work to the GPU, all the interactions of the drivers and libraries, trying to maintain compatibility with Pi1, 2, 3 and Pi4 on the same code, on programs that may not even know anything about the Pi4 (e.g. they either can't use GL 3.1, or they don't take advantage of it anyway, or they need a fully compliant implementation to use it, or they don't know that the Pi has one, or they were only ported to the Pi back in the days of it not having a Pi4, etc.).

Now multiply that by all the emulators involved.

Development is a thankless job. And if you release even a "beta" version, everyone just starts using it and swamping you with reports polluting the forums with it as if it were official anyway, and then you're never quite sure whether that's a bug in the beta or something in your new code, or something that just doesn't work yet, or something that's caused by a bad upgrade from an unofficial third-party Pi4 repo, etc. etc. but obviously you get all the flak for EVERYTHING that doesn't work and so on.

Be patient. Wait. Watch the github repo for progress. If you don't understand the github repo, commit log, and things that are going into the fkms branch, then let me put it this way: maybe leave it to the people who do and don't try to tell them how to do their... HOBBY.

If you're so absolutely desperate that you can't do without, spend an afternoon learning how to do it yourself, see what works and doesn't, and then try and get things working yourself - maybe you'll appreciate how difficult it is to do if you're not skilled, and how much time it takes.

That's what I just did. I have nearly £1000 tied up in a RPi4 cabinet I built and rather than just tell people off for it "not being ready" (not true anyway, you can get it working in an hour), I just started coding on it. From a background of 20+ years of amateur C development, sure, but that just tells you the same as the above. Either wait for someone who knows this stuff to do it for you, or get coding yourself and realise what you're asking of some random person on the Internet with no particular impetus to do this but the love of coding and as a favour to the community.

[Darksavior]

@sirhenrythe5th They get away with selling preloaded images by selling it with a product. One of the ex-admins of a retropie fb page sells gpi zeros preloaded. He got the boot for not allowing a pi4 3rd party image that requires $ in order to get early access (and probably other stuff since he's a jerk). Fb retropie pages are all garbage.

[sirhenrythe5th]

@Darksavior I know what you are talking about: M.F. & the crew with a name similar to the pop-band "the supremes".

I read M.F. last postings before he got "fired" concerning the ban of this popbandnamecrew because of their patreon-politic.
I fully agree that all these FB-Groups are trash!
And i dont make a difference between selling fully-loaded GPi-Cases (did not know that in detail, i thought he is just selling the CASES) or give special goodies for unofficial 3rd-party-software only when you pay in patreon.
Thats not my understanding of a free project and i am very lucky that we dont have this kind of kindergarten here.
This forum is great and the only way if you want to want to learn about the real thing imo.

[Bryan00569]

Asking for progress updates does not make someone impatient, nor should it be something people get upset about. It simply shows that people are interested and excited about the project. This of course excludes people that are being rude, negative, and demanding. It is possible to respectively ask for updates while remaining understanding of the time it takes to create such a amazing platform.

[dankcushions]

@Bryan00569

This of course excludes people that are being rude, negative, and demanding.

for example:

@Bryan00569 said

Entitled or not, free or not, contributed or haven't, at the end of the day all that matters is It’s not done and inexcusable.

@Bryan00569 said

All i see is a bunch of excuses.... /sigh

@Bryan00569 said

I understand this is being done on peoples free time but its been four months since the release of the pi4. Mansions Ill just leave this here

Fastest-built home: 2 hours, 52 minutes, 29 seconds

In 2005, a team of volunteers in Tyler, TX, set a world record building a 2,249-square-foot house in under three hours—hence its name,"2-Hour House."

:D

[ohmycommodore]

that's a three hour house

[KN4THX]

@ohmycommodore I think that's the retail mentality where people see a $9.99 item and say "Hey, that's cheap, it's not even ten dollars!".

[Bryan00569]

@dankcushions never said I wasn't a dick. I was simply saying that guy just asked a question and people were being rude. who cares if someone asked a question on progress or anything else. who cares if the question was asked 3839283 times. its a forum its whats it for. my previous comment still stands, we are now over 5 months since the release of the pi 4 with no suitable retropie software... just lazy. Hike up those - marks for this comment its nothing more than likes to me. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHA.

[herb_fargus]

@Bryan00569 only people who are lazy are those who complain about the progress of a community project.

[Bryan00569]

@herb_fargus ....... LOL yea we will go with that.

[mediamogul]

@Bryan00569 said in retropie for the PI4 ????:

marks for this comment its nothing more than likes to me.

I used to say the same thing about 'Your momma's so fat' jokes. Then one day, after watching her annihilate a whole box of Chocodiles and wash it down with a carton of buttermilk during the commercial break of a 'Cake Boss' marathon, I had to ask myself; "Is she indeed sitting around the house"? To that end, maybe you are indeed being entitled and impatient.

[saccublenda]

@Bryan00569 said in retropie for the PI4 ????:

never said I wasn't a dick.

True dat...

[muldjord]

@Bryan00569 said in retropie for the PI4 ????:

we are now over 5 months since the release of the pi 4 with no suitable retropie software

This is incorrect. The github has the RPi4 branch which works quite well for many, many of the platforms. Simply install Raspbian on your RPi4 and install the retropie-setup script from that branch. Then install the emulators and other tools you want. There are some pretty decent howto's on how to do all of this on reddit for instance.
What you will get with that is basically what RetroPie will be when it's done for the RPi4 minus some system specific optimizations I'm guessing. But in my experience it works well. I've been playinf N64 games by doing this with very decent performance. Something I can't do on the RPi3B+.

[mitu]

@Bryan00569 said in retropie for the PI4 ????:

its a forum its whats it for. my previous comment still stands, we are now over 5 months since the release of the pi 4 with no suitable retropie software... just lazy

Yes, we know, a house was built in 3 days, the world was done in 6 (according to some sources), etc. You're repeating yourself.

never said I wasn't a dick.

Then be yourself elsewhere. This is not a public forum and you're insulting the people that created this place to begin with.

[KN4THX]

While we are on the subject of development progress, I have general questions regarding the individual applications used in Retropie.

Is each emulator supported by its own team or is the Retropie team involved in managing these to make sure they are Raspbian/RPi Hardware compatible?

Sort of the same question I guess, but to word it differently, there are variations of each emulator for different hardware and OSes, so are those typically some sort of fork developed by a different set of individuals or is the Retropie team directly involved in the Retropie specific ones?