Mystical Ninja Starring Goeman on N64 - has anyone had any joy with this on Pi4?

mitu

@quicksilver I found that a nice script to monitor various Pi clocks and temperature is bcmstats. You can leave it started in a SSH session while testing the performance of your system.

quicksilver

@mitu oh neat! I'll definitely check this out, thanks.

AdamBeGood

@quicksilver I've changed the FrameSkip now (and taken the pointless overclock values out), but I still don't see any improvement. Thanks for the advice on those anyway, I am sure they have made things better marginally, but certainly not noticeably with Goeman.

Does yours really run smoothly? If you enter the game and then take the character immediately outside, the game does not choke up? I can't believe it!

quicksilver

@AdamBeGood said in Mystical Ninja Starring Goeman on N64 - has anyone had any joy with this on Pi4?:

Does yours really run smoothly? If you enter the game and then take the character immediately outside, the game does not choke up? I can't believe it!

No noticable slowdown whatsoever. I actually played until I got to the top of mt. Fuji. I'll double check your mupen64plus.cfg again to see if there are any other settings that may be different between us. Can you also check what your current video mode is in the runcommand menu?

Edit:
Only other difference I see in the gles2rice section of your mupen64plus.cfg is the texture enhancement filter setting. Try changing

TextureEnhancement = 6

To

TextureEnhancement = 0

AdamBeGood

@quicksilver Everytime I change something I am so optimistic that it is going the game is going to run fine, but it hasn't yet. Still very slow whenever the camera moves outside.

Here is the video option (I'm having trouble with uploading a screenshot) - "640 x 480 @60Hz 4:3 (25.18 MHz, nhsync, nvsync, driver)"

This is so confusing, there must be some difference between our two systems. I am glad the game can run on a Pi okay though, that is positive.

Edit: Could you post your muben64plus config and I will copy that wholesale - that will eliminate any possible differences caused by that?

Yobiwan

Just tried with gles2rice plugin and performances are not consistent. Sometime flawless, sometine choppy. I think we will have to deal with it for now...

AdamBeGood

@Yobiwan As in you get different performances on the same system? Or different across different systems?

AdamBeGood

I've got to the top of Mt.Fuji and back to the save point. It adds an extra element to the game when you have to try to keep the camera as straight as possible to avoid crippling slowdown. As soon as it starts panning, there is a problem.

quicksilver

@AdamBeGood this is very bizarre. I'll post my config when I have a chance. Can you confirm your TV is actually displaying in 640x480 mode? once you start the game up check and see if your TV remote has a "display" button or something similar that will show the current resolution. I'm wracking my brain to think what else could be different between our systems...

AdamBeGood

@quicksilver I really don't get it..

It's a monitor but resolution seems to be right. It shows as displaying at 640 X 480 when the game is running.

Yobiwan

@AdamBeGood It's on Pi4 4Go. I haven't tried on PC. I didn't play a lot but in the intro animation, when Sazuke is running on the roof tops there is a big slow down.

quicksilver

@AdamBeGood here is my mupen64plus.cfg. I do NOT recommend overwriting yours with mine. I have made other changes to the Gliden64 section and changed where save files are stored so it could mess up your setup. Just use it for comparison purposes. I compared it to your cfg and all relevant settings are the same now (assuming you changed the two settings I told you about).

https://pastebin.com/2CY08bU8

Ill keep thinking about what else I could have tweaked in the past that would be giving me a performance boost, but Im starting to run out of ideas...Id gladly post a video to show you the performance I am getting but Im not sure the best way to do that.

quicksilver

Something else I thought of, though I doubt its the solution. Try forcing the performance governor for the CPU. Go to retropie-setup, configuration, runcommand and change CPU governor to performance mode.

quicksilver

I posted a short test run video on youtube. You can see there is no choppiness.

AdamBeGood

That video is absolutely night and day with my experience... I am so jealous. It is like we are using different machines altogether.

I've gone through your Config now, I can't see any differences on any settings that could be relevant. I've tried the Performance mode as well. I don't know what else to do.

quicksilver

@AdamBeGood What power supply are you using and what type of cooling? Can you remove your overclock completely, reboot and retry the game? Do you have a TV you can hook it up to just to rule out an issue with your monitor? Do you have a spare SD card that you can install a completely stock retropie image and test just this game? Maybe you changed some setting somewhere that is hurting your performance.

Edit:
I just tested the game on a stock retropie setup (I only changed the screen update setting to 7 and forced 640x480 video mode in runcommand) and the game runs fullspeed for me. The issue must be something specific to your setup.

AdamBeGood

@quicksilver It's an official Pi Power Supply, the cooling is an Aluminium Armour heatsink.

I'll try the TV point, and I do have a spare SD card so I can give that a go. This is so confusing - I am not really much of a tinkerer so wouldn't have thought I'd changed anything to cause this. You never know though. I'd understand more if there was a general problem but this is the only game on N64 I have a problem with - and I use the Mupen-Rice for Pilotwings and that runs well.

Edit: The ROM couldn't be a difference could it? I think I tried Euro and US back when I first started trying to get this to work, but that could be different.

quicksilver

@AdamBeGood said in Mystical Ninja Starring Goeman on N64 - has anyone had any joy with this on Pi4?:

Edit: The ROM couldn't be a difference could it? I think I tried Euro and US back when I first started trying to get this to work, but that could be different.

I suppose it's possible. I'll see if I can get the md5 checksum.

AdamBeGood

@quicksilver That is the issue!

I was using the European ROM as that is what I always played, but the US version works absolutely perfectly.

I had tried that before to see if it made any difference but I didn't have the Rice Plugin set up with screenupdate 7, so neither version worked back then...

Thanks so much for your help! At least I have made some marginal gains probably - like the performance option on the CPU, and turning the Frameskip off.

retropieuser555

@AdamBeGood @quicksilver Yeah I just found the same thing you had, changing to the USA rom is night and day. I can't believe there's such an issue with the PAL version of the game!

Are you getting things like crackles when you hit enemies? On the original console it creates an explosion type sound, whereas here it doesn't seem to handle that sound effect well.

But other than that and the slight issues with the 2d graphics in the interface, this is totally playable. Out of curiosity I'm going to give it a try on my older pi 3b+ and see if this change actually fixes the game on that machine too. Or if this only works on pi 4.

Edit: I changed the screen update setting and audio to trivial on my older pi3b+ and used the US rom rather than the Pal rom, it definitely gave a speed boost. it's still choppy on the pi3. But it's on the pi4 the framerate and sound is pretty much bang on.