Latest Gamecube Developments on Pi4

[George Spiggott]

I've been playing around with Monkablyat's 64bit build for the Pi4 and although this isn't an official retropie build I thought there would be some interest here regarding its capabilities. Back in January when OpenGLES 3.1 arrived I had a Gentoo 64 / Dolphin build about which I wrote this:

My Gentoo/Dolphin setup is overclocked @ 2k on the CPU and 600 on the GPU. I rarely get over 20FPS on any games I try. If I turn frame skip up (a lot) I can make Bloodrayne and Legacy of Kain 2 run without lag but that's the best I get out of it. I'll keep the build and update it when changes happen just to see how things are progressing.

There are also some great ETA Prime videos on YouTube showing similar results.

Anyhow, last night I tried Legacy of Kain 2, Bloodrayne, Tomb Raider: Legend and Soul Calibur 2 on the Monkablyat build. I was getting 15-30 FPS in game with these games with Dolphin's CPU limiter set to 25-75%. All four of these games were about playable, LoK2 has some graphical errors which are very noticeable in cut scenes and SC2 is a little chuggy. For comparison I would describe the experience as similar to how PSP was on early Retropie Pi4 builds. SC2 on dolphin is definitely faster than SC1 on MAME.

I will try some more games tonight.

[George Spiggott]

So I tried a couple of other games. Crash Tag Team Racing and Worms 3D both run so well they are almost indistinguishable from full speed. I also tried Mario Kart: Double Dash and Resident Evil 4 (graphical errors make them unplayable). Mario Kart Wii (very slow, not really playable) and Rayman 3 (some slowdown and graphical errors but playable).

[ExarKunIv]

@george-spiggott i know the answer but i have to ask, you think metroid primeis playable?

[George Spiggott]

@exarkuniv It has some graphical problems and runs at a very pedestrian pace. It is not really playable IMO.

[ExarKunIv]

@george-spiggott i figured but i still wanted to ask. thanks for letting me know.

is it cool that some games are running on it

[Jste84]

Good to read, as someone who doesn't know much about these things...

Do we think there is potential for this to improve as development on the pi 4?

[George Spiggott]

@jste84 I'm running this without Vulcan so I would think yes. Vulcan is still patchy at the moment, apparently some emulators are improved but Dolphin is worse. Even without improvements it is reasonable to assume there will be a small number of games that work well enough to play on a Pi 4.

I tried Rogue Squadron 2 and Wipeout (Wii) tonight. Rogue Squadron is so slow I didn't even get past the intro. Wipeout is so close but just too choppy to play.

[Jste84]

@george-spiggott said in Latest Gamecube Developments on Pi4:

@jste84 I'm running this without Vulcan so I would think yes. Vulcan is still patchy at the moment, apparently some emulators are improved but Dolphin is worse. Even without improvements it is reasonable to assume there will be a small number of games that work well enough to play on a Pi 4.

I tried Rogue Squadron 2 and Wipeout (Wii) tonight. Rogue Squadron is so slow I didn't even get past the intro. Wipeout is so close but just too choppy to play.

Thanks for sharing - good to know, looking forward to seeing how this develops

[retropieuser555]

@george-spiggott Have you had a try with things like animal crossing or Luigi's Mansion? I haven't ever really used Dolphin as I still have a Wii sitting around but this forum post here outlines some examples of games that don't need as much power.

https://forums.dolphin-emu.org/Thread-list-games-that-do-not-need-a-high-end-cpu-to-emulate

[George Spiggott]

@retropieuser555 Thanks for posting that list I'll take a look through it. I tried New Super Mario Bros (right down at the bottom of low-mid tier) but as it's a Wii game I can't get the controls to work properly. Also I busted my Dolphin settings trying to get the Wii controller to connect. I'll reset everything and have another try with just Gamecube games for now.

I also experimented with Vulcan. It causes the graphics to break up to the point that gams are unplayable but it does appear to be 5-10FPS faster.

[George Spiggott]

I tried out Luigi's Mansion and it seems to play at a reasonable speed. I need to try it out on a more powerful computer to determine if it is running slowly, also I think some of the effects may be broken. I also gave Soul Calibur 2 another try with CPU set to 33% and have decided that it is fairly playable at a casual level.

[edit] Yep, Luigi's Mansion torch and 'vacuum' effects are broken, probably a few others as well and it runs a little slow. It is still playable. Kudos @YFZdude for the tip off.

[YFZdude]

@george-spiggott
There are videos of gameplay on dolphin here: https://wiki.dolphin-emu.org/index.php?title=Luigi's_Mansion

Might save you some time if it is gameplay from dolphin on x86.

[pi4papiba]

So, i created an account to share that i've been running lots of tests throughout the months and closely following GC progress on the Pi.
So, lets go:
A few tips to run dolphin with best possible speed:
composition turned off
low resolution on X
CPU overide in not cool. turn it off, it break games.

Opengl have some problems related to drivers that make double dash and RE4 have a blue filter over the screen.
This is seen also in android and other plataforms and chips that doesnt have driver support to some features regarding 3.3 OGL.
If the game has a pal version, use that. Since it runs in 50 over 60 and 25 over 30, it may be a difference from unplayable to playable.
I've managed to get full speed 50fps MKDD running my screen in 640x480.
Resident Evil remake is perfect playable. 30fps stable.
Most of games run 2/3 of speed in gles.

Now the best part of it all:
Vulkan support. Usually i compile the vulkan drivers once a month and run some tests to see if dolphin runs. For a few months it crashed but...
It started to run 2 months ago but with a far share of troubles regarding memory alloc, it causes glitches all over the screen but the games runs now. I tried a lot of games and all managed to run better than OGL regarding to performance and even that blue tint in MKDD and RE4 now is gone.
But the graphic glitches on the screen makes it unplayable for now, but you can see that the overhead that vulkan provides regarding to cpu power makes the games have better framerates even in state. I think we can be positive for great things coming in the next months.

I'll probably compile it again next week and see how it goes again.

[George Spiggott]

@pi4papiba some great tips there. I'm glad to see others are testing this out. I'm not experiencing the problems you have had with CPU override also what is the 'composition' option? Is it set to off by default? I tried a few more games off the mid-low spec list, Wario World and Super Monkey Ball 2, both run a bit too slowly to play an SMB2 has lots of graphical errors.

I can confirm @pi4papiba's report that Resident Evil 1 remake plays well. In addition I discovered that anything that does run well enough to play will do so with FXAA or MSAA x2 on. Much like with PPSSPP and Mupen64.P.N. there is very little additional overhead when this is used.

[pi4papiba]

@george-spiggott Hey! You are not alone. There are lots of people out there that really wants to see the pi shines even more with gamecube support.

I'm not experiencing the problems you have had with CPU override

In my experience it only improves variable framerate games (e.g. Spyro or The Last Story. For normal games it messes with game logic/speed and sound/music runs super strange. Its not like a frameskip in PPSSPP that is totally usable.
But if you dont notice, thats great. Keep it that way!

what is the 'composition' option? Is it set to off by default?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Composite
Basically its a program that runs on X window managers that is responsable to draw effects into the screen. Like vsync, shadows, blur, transparency, etc. Pretty much every desktop in linux uses one and it hurts performance a lot. Since dolphin is running under X, it benefits a lot from disabling it.
Just search on how to disable composition + your DE/WM and make sure your are not running it.

[George Spiggott]

@pi4papiba I still have not found the composite feature but I will keep looking. I did find that reducing the screen resolution to 1280x720 vastly improved the frame rate. Both Worms 3D and Soul Calibur 2 run at 30+ FPS this way (likely others also when I try them). I would say SC2 is fully playable like this. Unfortunately part of the screen is cut off in this screen mode making menus in Dolphin difficult to navigate, hopefully I can resolve this.

[pi4papiba]

@george-spiggott What OS and DE are you using? 32 or 64bit? MESA version?

[George Spiggott]

@pi4papiba I'm using the Monkabuntu 2.0 64bit Ubuntu build. My MESA is 19.3.2.1

This isn't my primary build for my Pi, My official Pi 4 Retropie image is so my MESA is the current (updated a few weeks ago) stable build that Retropie-update installs. I did consider trying downloading a more cutting edge version but I want to keep my Retropie build stable without having to modify the firmware back.

When things are more stable I may try an installation of Dolphin over Raspberry Pi OS. This build has several emulators installed but performance on N64 and PSP seems to be much worse than on my official build so I have not bothered with them.

Out of interest have you been able to successfully connect a real Wiimote on your build? I can connect it but the emulator disables it when the game starts. If I could connect my Wiimote then I could probably give Wii games a more thorough testing. Now I've got some Gamecube games to run at 30FPS I think some Wii game may be viable.

[Zering]

@george-spiggott Has anybody tested Paper Mario? I'm curious how performance is for that game.

[George Spiggott]

@zering I haven't. I've shelved this and gone back to my standard Retropie configuration. I'll go back to it when something new happens.