How do you build the RetroPie images that you ship?

GuySoft

Hey,
Been looking to see if there is a build script for the Raspbery Pi 4, and could not find what you use to build (I was wondering how hard it would be to convert stuff to a 64bit toolchain).
But could not find any sources - only the setup script. How are you preforming the builds?
Do you have nightly builds?

Also the creator of CustomPiOS so I am generally interested what project uses what.

muldjord

The weekly builds are here: https://files.retropie.org.uk/images/weekly/

mitu

The images are created using the image scriptmodule from RetroPie - https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/blob/master/scriptmodules/admin/image.sh. The procedure - loosely - is

download a Raspbian Lite image for the system in question (Pi 0/1, Pi 2/3 or Pi 4), create a local - emulated when needed - chroot with the contents
run the installation of RetroPie (as explained in the Docs) in the local chroot.
create a new .img with 2 partitions as the original Raspbian image and rsync the local chroot to the new .img, then compress it.

GuySoft

Ok, cool, I can also see you have: https://files.retropie.org.uk/images/weekly/retropie-buster-4.5.20-rpi4.img.gz

Thanks for the info! Going to play with that image right away.

I was wondering if I should use the following base image from Ubuntu for the 64bit RaspberryPi 4:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/RaspberryPi

Before I start playing with that and asking you questions - is this something you are already considering?

The reason is that 64bit should give a performance boost.

Also, I could convert that script to work with CustomPiOS. Which should give lots of flexabilty for weekly builds and multiple base images.

mitu

@GuySoft said in How do you build the RetroPie images that you ship?:

I was wondering if I should use the following base image from Ubuntu for the 64bit RaspberryPi 4:

Currently, for the Pi system, only Raspbian is supported.

Before I start playing with that and asking you questions - is this something you are already considering?
The reason is that 64bit should give a performance boost.

Not at the moment. I'm not sure if 64bit matters for emulation that much. We'd be loosing access to some emulators which don't have dynarec/optimizations for aarch64 (like pcsx-rearmed) and some features might not be available on 64bit systems (i.e. there is no 64bit userspace MMAL/OpenMAX IL support, so omxplayer or HW accelerated MEPG4 decoding for kodi might not work).

Since RetroPie is not an OS in itself, but uses Raspbian, 64bit support is going to be feasible when Raspbian will have 64bit support - and I mean in userspace, not just the kernel.

GuySoft

Thanks for the info ❤️

dankcushions

lr-beetle-psx has aarch64 dynarec support, but not sure how viable it is (its arm32 dynarec support is lacking). i think on the emulation side the tide has turned somewhat in aarch64 support and i'm eager to try it.

but yeah, as said because raspbian userland isn't 64-bit it's not viable for retropie at this time, but i am curious how you get on with a ubuntu 64 base image on a pi4. i guess you could compile the mesa drivers from source (if they support 64-bit?), and then modify the system.sh retropie script to use 64-bit compile flags for the pi4 platform. you would probably have to modify many of the emulator scripts which make a lot of assumptions about rpi and ARM support, also.

GuySoft

Hey,
Hope its OK to bring this chat backup:
Just FYI that there are issues using the current image on rpi-imager, see: https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager/issues/345#issuecomment-1030227726

BuZz

@guysoft There are no issues. It just doesn't support the imager systemd or cloudinit configuration.

Fortinbra

Is there a non-interactive way to run the retropie setup script?