Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?

roslof

@AdamBeGood what is your method of changing default settings?

pjft

@roslof and others,

If you would be so kind as to test this over lr-mame, it'd be very much appreciated. I tried to port the code to lr-mame which was mostly similar, though a few tweaks were needed as some public members of some classes in 2016 no longer existed in the latest code:

https://mega.nz/file/UZtH3KaL#3vZNKoR8IMbo4aSdCIaLDPbs3vrXSMLuPktuRKBkr6c

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1arGrZmKZb8TLag20UbKCAQKHt81ZkOgY/view?usp=sharing

Same kind of tests would help - changing the setting, confirming it actually changes it on MAME, and testing other games you run on lr-mame to confirm that nothing actually breaks.

I tested Deathsmiles and it seems to work well.

at 100%, it runs at average speed: 66.54% (135 seconds)
at 42% runs at average speed: 70.95% (146 seconds)

I tested pacman as well and it didn't crash, so that's success for me.

If this gets its tires kicked and nothing breaks, I'll happily submit this upstream.

Many thanks in advance.

roslof

@pjft said in Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?:

If you would be so kind as to test this over lr-mame, it'd be very much appreciated.

Me? Test a new toy? You cray.

First thing: The change works. Properly saves and loads back perfectly. No remarkable side-effects.

Air Combat (aircomb.zip)
Test: Add 4 Credits. Measure on title Screen
Default: Solid 28.45 FPS
CPU 30: Between 28.87 to 29.72 FPS
Minor Improvement. Values hold perfectly after restart

Virtua Fighter (vf.zip)
Test: Attract Demo
Default: ~32 to 34 FPS
CPU 70: ~32 to 34 FPS
No noticeable improvement. Needs a higher CPU or graphics flicker

Pong (pong.zip)
Test: Attract Demo
Default: 47.5 to 47.8 FPS
CPU 30-50: 47.5 to 47.8 FPS
No noticeable improvement.

Might be GPU bound on these (um, for Pong, I have no idea). CPU change didn't have significant/measurable impact.
But it IS working, since underclocking VF too low resulted in a negative experience.

Will try more games later.
Hope this is helpful

AdamBeGood

@roslof Retroarch Menu -> Configuration File -> Reset to Defaults is what I was going with.

dankcushions

@roslof said in Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?:

@AdamBeGood I believe these are default (could verify by renaming the retroarch.cfg file and re-running RetroArch to rebuild it... all of it)

that will give you retroarch defaults for ALL settings, which will break retropie in various ways. we use our own defaults.

if you've messed up your retroarch settings (just don't change latency stuff unless you know exactly what you're doing, IMO), reinstall retroarch via retropie-setup, and it will create a copy of our stock retroarch.cfg as retroarch.cfg.rp-dist in the /opt/retropie/configs/all/ - delete the old retroarch.cfg and rename the rp-dist one to retroarch.cfg. if you instead messed with an individual core's retroarch.cfg, then reinstall that core and do the rename within /opt/retropie/configs/(whatever)/. if you've created core/game overrides, delete them.

you can see what these various latency settings do here: https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Input-Lag - as you can see, the advice is to NOT change them because they cause known problems.

dankcushions

@AdamBeGood said in Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?:

@roslof Retroarch Menu -> Configuration File -> Reset to Defaults is what I was going with.

this will also give you the same issue i mentioned above.

pjft

@roslof Thanks for testing these out, and above all make sure nothing breaks. That's indeed helpful, and I'll submit the change upstream. Mostly worried about it crashing other games, but it doesn't seem to be the case.

Interesting - I hadn't kept up with MAME, I had no idea that Pong was now emulated. I imagine that it's not a really easy one to emulate, as it was more of a physical simulation if I recall correctly.

http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=pong

Reading the "INFO" tab there will provide some interesting backstory.

Thanks for giving these a shot.

AdamBeGood

@dankcushions Fair enough, I will stop tinkering so much I think! I just really wanted to get DeathSmiles working better, and now it does. Mission accomplished.

I completed it yesterday evening! :)

Thanks very much for all the information, I don't think I've done anything severe enough to warrant reinstalling but it is good to know how to go about that for when I do mess it up!

pjft

@AdamBeGood Nice, great to hear! Did it work well end to end with underclocking?

I'd certainly revert the options to the original ones, at least the ones @roslof mentioned. As @dankcushions stated, the options included in RetroPie are kind of adjusted for better performance in our scenarios.

By the way, I just submitted the PR for lr-mame. Thanks for testing it out @roslof .

AdamBeGood

@pjft Yeah, it was playable! Sometimes incredible slowdown, but it is hard to know how much of that is built into the game and how much of it is the Pi.

I've tried Pink Sweets and Ibara today, they are fairly slow but I think I could maybe play them for a while. Muchi Muchi Pork seems acceptable to me also, better than the other two.

I've reverted those options now!

Good work on the lr-mame PR, hope it goes through as quickly. The underclock is a good option to have, it really makes a difference.

Unless something else comes up, Mystical Ninja Starring Goeman on N64 is now my only significant problem game. Not a bad place to be in really.

stevas

Thanks for the suggestion of over voltage to 6, but it's solved nothing for me.

I try to go anything above:

gpu_freq=700
v3d_freq=750
arm_freq=1950

And the game I'm testing (Dreamcast capcom Vs snk) just craps itself after starting a match (reboots itself).

From the numbers I see talked about on here, either I'm just flat out doing something wrong, or I've been extraordinarily unlucky? Or flycast is glitchy as hell?

pjft

@stevas as mentioned, please start a separate thread and provide more details there. Does the game not crash in lower frequencies? If so, then yes, you're out of luck there.

But don't change GPU freq on the pi 4. Remove that and try again. See this: https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/configuration/config-txt/overclocking.md

roslof

@stevas I'm thinking now it's either your kernel version or cooling on the Flirc.

Have you upgraded lately?
https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/raspbian/updating.md

roslof

@pjft said in Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?:

@stevas as mentioned, please start a separate thread and pedicure more details there.

Good point.

stevas

Okay, there's a possible explanation here.

I recently changed PSU (to one which has a switch).
And it seems fine with over voltage 5, but not 6. I totally forgot I was using that now. Apologies.

I also didn't realise you were supposed to use individual settings rather than gpu_freq - so thanks for that heads up. (Does the hdmi_enable and the gpu_freq fighting over core_freq possibly upset things, btw? Because... Yeah, I was using both.)

The kernel should be relatively up to date, as I did update all after a recent rebuild. Like, maybe 10 days ago.
(Quick related question: is it possible to update all and specifically NOT update just one package? Say, fbneo. Just... Everything but that?)

Is that "specific to pi 4b" section a very recent addition? I swear I was on that OC page, like, a week ago, and didn't notice it...

Anyway, I'll go back to my official PSU and try some things out, and if I still have such issues I'll raise a new shout for help!

Thanks a bunch, y'all are great.

pjft

I have to say that "pedicure" instead of "provide" isn't the worst auto correct I've ever had. Fixed that.

The remarks around the pi 4 have been there for a while, it's what caused me to set the 3 settings individually when I was playing with it. But you never know, go test things out! Feel free to tad me in the new thread, or report back here if successful.

stevas

Haha, I did wonder if there was some weird use of the word in the pi world I was as of yet unaware of...

Yeah, thanks loads - I'll try your individual settings and see if the official PSU fixes the weirdness I'm seeing...

stevas

Well, if anything, it's even worse.

I'm really starting to hate this thing.

stevas

Sigh.

Okay, I figured out that the entire problem is capcom vs snk through flycast, which seems to suffer from some sort of memory leak.
I'm unsure if:
a) this is due to that specific game, or;
b) it's because I've set some flycast core option the pi just does not like -
but, overclocking seems to accelerate the issue, i.e. the more you OC, the faster it forces a reboot.

I will raise this as a separate issue, but it looks like my OC settings are fine; and yes, I wasted a LOT of time thinking they were the problem.
A.
LOT.
/thousand yard stare/

Edit
And you know what, I just realised that:
"There is a memory leak somewhere in the Reicast code" is in the documentation for flycast.
So... Arse.

barbudreadmon

@stevas said in Deathsmiles on lr-mame2015 : Any performance tips?:

but, overclocking seems to accelerate the issue, i.e. the more you OC, the faster it forces a reboot

3 possible causes for those reboot :

overheating => try better cooling or safer overclocking
power supply issues => maybe your psu is bad
bad board => buying a raspberry pi is a lottery... might be worth mentioning the early models of pi4 had faulty components...

Also :

i don't know of any memory leak in flycast code
if a memory leak was causing a reboot of your device (a freeze/crash after using every last bit of memory would be more likely), it would happen on every device, that's not the case
flycast is not reicast