Gorf: What's the closest arcade experience on a RetroPie?

OneSwitch

I'm trying to get the closest arcade experience of Gorf on a RetroPie using a Rasbperry Pi 3B+. Personally I have....

Pi2Scart on a CRT monitor turned vertically with a smoked glass perspex overlay.

For anyone with Pi2Scart, I'm using this boot config file: Pi2Scart config download.

With lr-MAME2003 with 204x320 custom resolution manually centred, the static image is fantastic. I have speech working (essential to my mind). But... the game play is quite bad. It's jittery, sprites flicker and the slow down is horrible. I know the original arcade game had issues, but this is a lot worse.

With lr-MAME2010, with a bit of messing about to turn off the on-screen mock-up of the light panel (not bothered about this, and spoils the TV display), and a resolution of 240x352, this looks fantastic too. It runs so much faster. Some screen tear and the odd frame skip (improved by turning off vsync I feel), but the game is fun this way. However no speech.

My question is, is it possible to play with lr-MAME2003 at a decent speed? Or can Speech be made to work on lr-MAME2010? Or is there something better to try now?

OneSwitch

Think I've found my own solution. Gorf seems to run lovely as this:

MAME version: lr-mame2010 (drop gorf.zip in

SPEECH: drop latest gorf.zip samples package in retropie > bios > mame2010 > samples (get to this by connecting RetroPie to Wifi, then typing //retropie in your search bar - hopefully that will work).

With the game running, use TAB to set the video options to Pixel Aspect (15:22) or Standard (3:4). Use Libretro settings (home+X on an Xbox controller on my set-up - your may differ) - and go to the Quick Menu > Settings > Video > and then mess around with Integer Scale On/Off to set to

Aspect Ratio custom - Aspect ratio width 240, Asepct ratio height 352, centre with X and Y position (integer scale off at that point), and vsync off/on (which ever you prefer).

I also flick a CRT monitor 90 degrees for vertical orientation by popping the micro SD card into my PC and editing the config.txt file (with Notepad++) as previously mentioned.

There's still some possible issues with the refresh rate, if anyone has a better setup let me know, but I'm extremely happy with this. Looks amazing with a sheet of ICI 1982 smoked perpsex in front of an old CRT monitor. Better than the original in some ways.

grant2258

you probably need the samples for mame2010 for the samples to work

OneSwitch

Yes, I meant to say I got the new ones here: http://samples.mameworld.info/ - which work really well.

chubsta

I have no idea how to improve it but I have to say this is one of my very favourite games ever and until a couple of years ago I owned a minty original cabinet. Getting it to run in RetroPie is a doddle compared to trying to keep a set of original Gorf boards going as they suffer badly from over heating etc so I look forward to your solution as I may build a dedicated repro cab some day!

I will follow this post with interest so please update with your progress...

quicksilver

For those who don't have a vertical monitor this gorf overlay is awesome and has working side lamps:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/20486/backdrops-in-mame2003-plus/331

@OneSwitch here is a issue report I made a while back about gorf's performance on mame2003+ but nothing came of it:

https://github.com/libretro/mame2003-plus-libretro/issues/675

OneSwitch

Early days Raspberry Pi RetroPie test here:

. It chops text off the bottom of the screen on my TV, but doesn't effect game-play.

Gets hectic quick, and plays much better than mame2003 on the Pi.

I imagine it will have to wait until RetroPie runs on the new Raspberry Pi 4 for newer versions of MAME that might support the little yellow lights. I'm not too bothered about them personally, as the speech tells you what level you're up to. Would be fantastic to see someone get a really close version of Gorf working in a cabinet. Mine will be a tabletop set-up.

wstanek

@OneSwitch I just came across your thread on Gorf here. Gorf was one of my grail type games that I was never able to get to run right. It never made sense as to why it was so slow, but seemed to slow way down on the Galaxian level when there was a lot of sound. I copied your plan with mame2010 and lo and behold there she goes! I have it running on my Mad Planets cab (build thread posted last year), so I have the trigger stick and everything.

From what I remember of the actual game, it was a little bit sticky. You might think you still have a performance issue but I think the game was never all that smooth. The mame2010 emulation feels totally accurate.

So thank you for figuring that out, it checks a huge box for my collection!

ws