Mystical Ninja Starring Goeman on N64 - has anyone had any joy with this on Pi4?
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@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).
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.
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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.
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I posted a short test run video on youtube. You can see there is no choppiness.
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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.
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@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. -
@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@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.
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@retropieuser555 Glad to hear it! It's a different title screen to what I'm used to but I can cope with that! :p
I am not getting the crackling sound - have you made the "trivial" change in the mupen64plus config? Change RESAMPLE to "trivial" in the [AUDIO-SDL] section. That fixes crackling noises with explosions in other games.
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@AdamBeGood don't forget that mupen64plusaudio setting needs to be 0 in the autoconf.cfg as well for that setting to work
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@quicksilver Thank you, I don't remember that at all but good to know! I don't think I changed that so maybe mine was already set to 0.
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So having a play through of this game, I got to the first Impact fight and that worked, the only issue is when I used the multipunch move the sound got all messed up and it gave a few crackles for the rest of the battle. But once I beat the boss and the game went back into the normal Goemon mode the sound went back to normal.
Oh few glitches I've found so far: In Yamato when you go to the Turtle Rock and push the rock so it teleports you to the island, then to another island and then onto a boat. I tried this 3 times and it consistently causes a crash and sends you back to emulationstation. Oddly it doesn't do this when you pick the option to teleport outside of the shrine.
And the controller pac doesn't work, if you choose it the game hangs. But I'm just using save states to circumvent that, so it's not a big deal.
One thing I'm curious about is apparently there's a room in the Ghost Dungeon that used to cause emulators to crash, I'll play further and report back if that bug is there.
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@retropieuser555 I'm only just at Oedo Castle so will have to report back on most of this!
My Controller Pak works fine, I can say that much. I'm not using save states.
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@AdamBeGood really? Interesting, did you change any settings to get the controller Pak to work? Maybe I need to edit something to enable it, I might try a different game that I know uses the controller pak and test that
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@retropieuser555 No, I haven't changed anything to get the Pak to work... I guess I am just lucky! It's not a big miss if you have Save States anyway.
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@AdamBeGood Okay apparently the controller pak does work now. I think maybe when I was testing the PAL rom was when I was finding it didn't work.
Also found the first big bug, so I dunno how well you know the game and apologies for spoilers, but the Blue Dragon that is the fast travel function. When you try and call that it crashes back to Emulationstation. Which given when you first get the flute you're stuck in the folk village & you can't physically walk back to the earlier towns, that's a big problem imo.
But I've found a workaround, I saved before playing the flute, exited, changed the plugin to GlideN64, played the flute, then saved, exited and changed the plugin back to Rice.
Not looking forward to doing that everytime I want to fast travel ha! But at least it lets you progress further.
Edit:- Just beat the second dungeon, So unless something else comes up it seems the game will be beatable.
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@retropieuser555 Wow, you're really ripping through it! I have a 18 month old, she cuts into my playing time a bit.
Great shout on the workaround for the Dragon crash, I'll let you know if that occurs when I get there. Workaround sounds annoying but not so annoying that it makes playing the game pointless.
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Okay so finished the game just now. Nothing really slows it down much, you just encounter a few crashes during gameplay. But it's doable with a couple of other tricks:-
The Blue Dragon Fast Travel causes a crash. So save state, switch to another plugin, use it then save and go back to Rice.
Also I discovered loading the World Map at any time will crash (Start then Z Button)
The second Impact boss (the big Fish Robot). Right before the fight starts Rice crashes back to emulationstation. So save there and switch to GLideN64 for the fight. It works ok in this Impact battle compared to normal gameplay.
For the final boss the sound gets a bit messed up but it is fine in Rice, you don't need to switch to GlideN64 (it seems to play terribly in that plugin)
Oh and the credits crashed in Rice ha! Typical, you get right to the end of the game and the emulator crashes! But again, just make a save state and switch to GLideN64 if you want to see all the credits.
I didn't collect all the Fortune Cats so no idea if the Boss Rush mode works or whatever.
All in, for a big fan of the game it's worth playing; you don't encounter these crashes for a fair bit of gameplay anyway. Good Luck!
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@retropieuser555 I'll let you know when I get to the points you mention. My World Map doesn't crash though, I've at least got that far!
Well done for finishing it!
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