Until Retropie is ready for Pi 4, what are some good standalone emulators that showcase its ability?
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I've been putting my new 4gb Pi 4 through some paces, and am really pleased with the performance increase. While waiting for a Pi 4 optimized version of Retropie, I'd like to see what it can do in the meantime, what emulators or ports would you recommend that have a significant performance increase on the Pi 4?
System Config: Retropie 4.4 with full desktop, RPi 3B, 256gb SD, 5v 2.1A 5,200 mAH USB battery. EasyMSX controller mounted with Pimoroni Hyperpixel 4 (non touch). Also running 4.6 on a 4gb Pi 4 serving as my primary desktop computer now.
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@VictimRLSH definitely ReDream the Dreamcast emulator, it runs games flawlessly.
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Ah! thanks, I've been hoping it would do well with Dreamcast emulation. I also found That Mupen64 runs well under Lakka, but I currently have Rasbian Buster installed and have no plans to use another OS.
Flash games under Chromium now run at full speed, and I can even play the really hungry ones like Battle Pirates and Gemcraft Chasing Shadows.
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@VictimRLSH You won't be seeing an optimized version of retropie (unofficial or official) until maybe mid to late january. That's the estimate a pi engineer gave when being asked about the optimized mesa drivers being implemented in raspbian. Unless the retropie team decides to bundle their own compiled mesa driver like what the redream dev did. That's why redream runs way faster than flycast/reicast. N64 doesn't run well for the higher end games like goldeneye but I'm sure that'll change with the driver.
All emulators benefit. Depends on what you're looking for. You can now run even more games on fb-neo that ran too slow on a pi3b. Which means, at least for me, having to only use older emulators like mame2003 or mame2010 for games that aren't emulated well on fb-neo like the mk games, or games that aren't supported at all.
Personally, my aim was to have fullspeed snes emulation and the pi4 does that. A pi3b+ can't run every game fullspeed using the latest version of snes9x (no year). I also enable its speedhacks to fix slowdowns in games like super r-type so that requires extra power. For the adventurous type, bsnes is playable on the pi4..just don't try any special chip games.
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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgfQjdc5RceRlTGfuthBs7g
pilab has some videos using box86 and mesa drivers developed by ptitseb and salvador liébana -
@Efriim said in Until Retropie is ready for Pi 4, what are some good standalone emulators that showcase its ability?:
pilab has some videos using box86 and mesa drivers developed by ptitseb and salvador liébana
Just a little clarification: ptitseb is not a Mesa developer - it's the creator of
box86andgl4es, among others.
The latter name doesn't sound familiar, but I suspect it's the videos author (?). -
What about RA cores and optimized mesa drivers? Will there be any significant performance boost compared to what can be installed manually today?
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I have my overclocked Pi4 running an unofficial Retropie build.
Flycast runs games comfortably at full speed.I can play Soulcalibur at 1024×768. Mupen64 is a little less smooth but will run most games in 640x480. Ppsspp is also a little patchy but most games are playeble in 2x to 3x resolution. PSXrearmed runs everything I put through it at full speed with double resolution
I tried the Gentoo/Dolphin combination but I couldn't get anything to run much into double figures for FPS. With a lot of frame skipping you can make games controllable but not really playable. I suspect Dolphin will remain a novely until some major changes to the OS (full 64 bit Raspian) and graphics drivers (OpenGLES 3.1+ or Vulcan) happen.
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I'm at a loss for x86 emulation due to the fact that Exagear's licensing server went away after they did and QEMU just does NOT work at all on the Pi 4. It would be nice to see what that power can do outside of DosBox...
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@VictimRLSH It was mentioned briefly before - https://github.com/ptitseb/box86 seems to try and fill that gap.
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@mitu Yeah, I've watched some of the videos but that doesn't QUITE look mature enough, but will definitely continue to keep an eye on it. It's better than the $30 brick I now have in Exagear. It really sucks they didn't stick around long enough to develop a Pi 4 version.
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@VictimRLSH You have my sympathies. Such problems are one of the reasons I try very hard to avoid anything that needs online activation of any sort.
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