Getting the best N64 experience on a Pi 4

quicksilver

I prefer the standalone mupen64plus with gliden64. It seems to be faster than lr-mupen64plus-next. From what I understand lr-mupen64plus-next is not multi-threaded yet, so that might be part of the reason. There are a couple games where I still use the old gles2rice plugin (excitebike, crusin usa and a few others) but only because performance is terrible otherwise. For Mario golf, the only emulator that works is the old lr-mupen64plus it has glitches but is playable while all other emulators crash. I also use lr-mupen64plus for any of the old n64 romhacks (star road, last impact) because most of them are no longer compatible with the newer emulators. Don't bother with lr-parallel-n64, it segfaults on startup on almost with every game.

George Spiggott

GlideN64 seems more accurate (it puts in the moving billboard on Mario Cart). I can't seem to bring up any retroarch options with it though and it defaults to 3:4 aspect ratio.

dankcushions

@George-Spiggott said in Getting the best N64 experience on a Pi 4:

GlideN64 seems more accurate (it puts in the moving billboard on Mario Cart)

i recently fixed this in lr-mupen64plus-next: https://github.com/libretro/mupen64plus-libretro-nx/pull/160 - it will take some time to be accepted, though.

I can't seem to bring up any retroarch options with it though and it defaults to 3:4 aspect ratio.

mupen64plus-gliden64 is not retroarch so you won't get any options. all n64 emus should default to 4:3 (assume you meant this), since that's what they were normally. it's possible to change it in the config of gliden64, though.

George Spiggott

I look forward to seeing that.

Does anyone know why the graphics on worms: Armageddon look so blurry on the N64 compared to say the Ps1.

George Spiggott

Is it ever worth using the 16:9 screen resolutions and the two settings for it? Do any games actually make use of it?

dankcushions

@George-Spiggott said in Getting the best N64 experience on a Pi 4:

Is it ever worth using the 16:9 screen resolutions and the two settings for it? Do any games actually make use of it?

some games had anamorphic widescreen modes, so i guess it would be worth it for that: https://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=41744

George Spiggott

@quicksilver said in Good news regarding tearing and low EmulationStation performance on Pi 4:

@George-Spiggott Without getting too far off topic. Try mupen64plus-gliden64. It seems to run full speed for me. Generally it is faster than lr-mupen64plus-next.

Thanks @quicksilver. I hope you don't mind me replying here instead. I tried mupen64plus-gliden64 but the game seems sluggish and the sound is distorted. IMO lr-mupen64plus-next definitely plays SotE better as only the sound is affected.

As an aside I tried running SotE with the CPU overclock turned off. It made no difference to the game speed whatsoever.

quicksilver

@George-Spiggott Yes this seems a better place for this conversation. It plays full speed for me with gliden64. Can you post the contents of /opt/retropie/configs/n64/mupen64plus.cfg and /opt/retropie/configs/all/autoconf.cfg? Perhaps our settings are different?

George Spiggott

Thanks @quicksilver. Here they are.

mupen64plus.cfg

[edit] new link

autoconf.cfg

"8bitdo_hack = "0"
es_swap_a_b = "0"
disable = "0"
mupen64plus_audio = "0"
mupen64plus_compatibility_check = "0"
mupen64plus_hotkeys = "1"
mupen64plus_texture_packs = "1""

quicksilver

@George-Spiggott are you sure that is your mupen64plus.cfg? It's not fully populated. That looks more like mupen64plus.cfg.rp-dist.

George Spiggott

@quicksilver Oops yes it is. Fixed the link above.

quicksilver

In the audio-sdl section change resample to "trivial" that should help with the audio issues.

Are you running in 4k mode?

George Spiggott

@quicksilver Will check the audio settings. TV is 1080p. Mupen is running in 320x240.

I don't understand why the audio cuts out when there is so much spare processing time. I assumed that audio is processed by the CPU.

dankcushions

@George-Spiggott said in Getting the best N64 experience on a Pi 4:

@quicksilver Will check the audio settings. TV is 1080p. Mupen is running in 320x240.

I don't understand why the audio cuts out when there is so much spare processing time. I assumed that audio is processed by the CPU.

if the gpu can't deliver frames in time, it bottlenecks everything else. cpu power is mostly irrelevant with n64 on raspberry pi. even the rpi 2 has enough grunt most of the time.

George Spiggott

@quicksilver I went for a variation on your suggestion, I had a look at the audio settings for lr-mupen64plus-next and increased Audio Latency (ms) to 512 (from 64). It seems to have smoothed out most of the audio issues I have. The game still doesn't run at 100% speed but it is well playable.

I have also pretty much completely turned off my CPU overclock. I am tempted to see how far I can push the GPU to iron out the frame rate issues on N64 and PSP.

@dankcushions thanks for the explanation.

George Spiggott

@dankcushions I found a list of the games that dk benefit from 16:9. There seems to be about half a dozen of them.

https://www.google.com/amp/gametyrant.com/news/n64-games-that-had-widescreen-support-part-1-anamorphic-widescreen%3Fformat=amp

The only one I have is Perfect Dark. It will take advantage of 16:9 adjusted. You have to have a fairly sharp eye to notice the difference e.g the moon is actually a cirle at the start of level 1. Nice to find a game with that option though.

George Spiggott

Does anyone know how to gwt Mario Cart 64 to run in 640x480 without the graphics breaking up on the character select screen?

quicksilver

@George-Spiggott can you post a screenshot? Often times there are issues with 2D objects having lines in them when you increase the resolution beyond the original render resolution of that system. This happens with a number of emulators, not just mupen64plus.

dankcushions

@George-Spiggott i belive:

# Render 2D texrects in native resolution to fix misalignment between parts of 2D image. (0=Off, 1=Optimized, 2=Unoptimized)
EnableNativeResTexrects = 0

to

# Render 2D texrects in native resolution to fix misalignment between parts of 2D image. (0=Off, 1=Optimized, 2=Unoptimized)
EnableNativeResTexrects = 1

in /opt/retropie/configs/n64/mupen64plus.cfg

or the equiv core option in lr-mupen.

quicksilver

@dankcushions I had not noticed that option before. Do you know if there a performance hit for using it?