PI4 8GB & Retropie - Is it supported?

jinsta

Ok thanks for all the help on this one. I did another fresh card with PI OS, ran the reccomended sudo update&full-upgrade. I then installed retropie from in there and can confirm..........it does work!

On another spare card installed retropie using official pi 4 image and can this still has bootloader error. My original premade image card also has the error. So knowing it can work via PiOS, is there anything i can do/copy across to make these work? tried again to copy over DAT & ELF files onto the premade 'damaso' image, but still seems to get stuck on controller input screen. My kb doesnt work either but its not wired so might not be recognised for that image (wireless with usb dongle)

I know making my own image from scratch is the way to go, but i've been fairly happy with premade ones upto now and would really need to dig through old hds for roms (not really had need since 2b days)

dankcushions

@jinsta i'm sorry but we do not support third party images, no exceptions. i think you're finding out why...

jinsta

@dankcushions

i understand, makes sense!

Thank you for all the help folks! very much appreciated

jinsta

Right finally got this working :)

To confirm, 3rd party images at the moe dont seem to be supported, but just wanted to highlight the official ''image'' download of 4.6 (found under pi4, https://retropie.org.uk/download/) also does not work and you will get a boot error occur

You can however get RP 4.6 to work! From official Raspberry Pi page, download the imager app: https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Using the app, there is an option to choose the op system you want to install, so retropie for us and then let it do its thing. It will format disk/write image in one go. Once you put the SDcard in Pi, it will boot, no errors whatsover straight into Retropie!

Note: If you use windows 10, there is chance the imager will fail to write, its a windows setting thats the issue and this is the fix: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=267364&sid=f6d32a82c84ebcfacdc2b3f1536cc4c1&start=25#p1664662

With Pi up and running! just needed to load roms which are on my external ssd. (indeed, the following is correct proc: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Running-ROMs-from-a-USB-drive/). The SSD was again working painfully slow and needed the fix mentioned (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=245931) to sort that out.

mitu

@jinsta said in PI4 8GB & Retropie - Is it supported?:

Using the app, there is an option to choose the op system you want to install, so retropie for us and then let it do its thing. It will format disk/write image in one go. Once you put the SDcard in Pi, it will boot, no errors whatsover straight into Retropie!

The Raspberry Pi Imager literally downloads the same image that's available on retropie.org.uk/downoad, so you wrote the same image twice.

jinsta

@mitu but still doesn't work for some reason. Using the image on its own results in boot error. Try it

Darksavior

@mitu I've seen others having issues with the 8GB version but then they try the latest pi os and it's fine. Retropie's image probably needs to be updated.

jinsta

@Darksavior said in PI4 8GB & Retropie - Is it supported?:

@mitu I've seen others having issues with the 8GB version but then they try the latest pi os and it's fine. Retropie's image probably needs to be updated.

I'm sure it will be soon enough as notticed if you run basic install/update in RP, you get upto to version 4.7. Hopefully in the future, something 64bit to use all the ram would be awesome too

Darksavior

@jinsta The retropie script already supports 64bit but it's not done. Why would it matter if it sees the full 8GB? You do know that retropie barely uses around 1GB max? You will not gain any performance with retropie by having the 4GB or 8GB model.

Clyde

@Darksavior I suppose you may get a little speed or smootheness in Emulation Station when browsing the same images or videos repeatedly, since Linux fills any unused RAM with buffered data. That said, I never checked that assumption with free -h on my 4GB Pi 4 to confirm this. 🙂

mitu

@Clyde said in PI4 8GB & Retropie - Is it supported?:

That said, I never checked that assumption with free -h on my 4GB Pi 4 to confirm this.

free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:          3.6Gi       111Mi       216Mi        10Mi       3.2Gi       3.3Gi
Swap:            0B          0B          0B

Clyde

@mitu Thanks, so the ram is used pretty much for buffering on RetroPie. Of course, that by itself doesn't say much about any noticable impact on the user experience. I just wanted to mention this consideration, because the buffering tends to be forgotten in such discussions.

Darksavior

@Clyde I'm not sure if installing from source are made to use the extra ram, but it'd be a plus if it could.
I use this pi control panel to look at my ram usage.

This is on a fresh boot to the pegasus frontend:

toString

@jinsta I had problems on my 4gb after I updated the eeprom. Plus ssd booting very slow. I noticed when I updated in the script it goes to .7 which is strange. Why not have .7 on the website?!

dankcushions

@toString said in PI4 8GB & Retropie - Is it supported?:

@jinsta I had problems on my 4gb after I updated the eeprom. Plus ssd booting very slow. I noticed when I updated in the script it goes to .7 which is strange. Why not have .7 on the website?!

a new image is not generated every minor version change. currently the script version is 4.6.7, and the image is 4.6. typically a new image would be generated for 4.7.

toString

@dankcushions Either way it's annoying because the boot files are not updated and if you're trying to boot from sad in the newly released NesPi4 cases you hit a wall. I literally had to install RaspiOS and copy the .elfs and .dats over to my RetroPie ssd to get it working.

Clyde

@Darksavior said in PI4 8GB & Retropie - Is it supported?:

@Clyde I'm not sure if installing from source are made to use the extra ram, but it'd be a plus if it could.

The buffers / disk cache that show up in free -h and your desktop tool shouldn't be affected by the installation method, as AFAIK they are managed by the Linux kernel itself. But as such, they'd only speed up repeated loading of the same files, e.g. the pictures or videos when browsing games in Emulation Station.