All genesis/megadrive games run slow (on both lr emulators) in new 4.8 image on R Pi 2B

timbone316

I’ve had a retropie image on my raspberry pi 2 for a couple years now. Recently, I realized that my micro SD card had failed because it had converted to read only. Since I hadn’t updated in a while, I decided to put the new retro pi 4.8 image on an SD card and throw it in. Everything works great, except all Genesis games. Every single one loads fine, and runs fine, until you move a camera at all. For instance, in Aladdin, the game runs at full speed, 60 frames per second. As soon as Aladdin moves, and the camera has to move with him, it drops down to 30 to 40 frames per second, and there is audio stuttering. I think it has to do with a floating point number calculation perhaps? If you happen to get Aladdin to a certain spot, and the camera settles, the game runs fine again. But it doesn’t always. I’m wondering if landing on an integer number makes the game run smoothly. Anyway, I never had this problem with my old retropie image (it might have been 4.4 or 4.5). But now that it’s on Buster, this is a new problem that’s cropped up. It's on picodrive and genesis-plus-gx, and with any Genesis game. It plays NES, SNES, CPS1, CPS2 fine, and it ran butter smooth before i updated. I'd hate to revert versions, but does anyone have any other solutions? Thanks.

dankcushions

@timbone316
please fill in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first, including verbose log, with a specific example. please use picodrive in your test as it's the default for pi2 (it's faster)

Darksavior

@dankcushions I helped out this person on the subreddit and told him to post his issue here. I also tried it on a pi2 at 1Ghz with the official 4.8 image. It was hitting the mid 40s in genesis plus gx. Dispmanx and setting governor to performance didn't help.

What I found interesting is that I tried Retropie on bullseye-lite 32bit (yes, I got it to compile with some minor work) and it's more or less 60fps with the same game in gx. I had to put the pi2 back to work as a pihole so I can't do any more tests and I forgot to test it with the kms driver when using the official buster image.

eafindme

Hi, I'm having the same issue too today. For Sega Genesis emulation is very slow on Pi 2 Model B. Not sure what happen to 4.8 . Previously I am using version 4.4 and it runs smoothly without any issue at all.

dankcushions

@eafindme my previous reply still applies - please provide the requested info and logs

daid

I still have a similar issue, and I have done some testing. I thought it was better to necro an old thread with the same issue rather than claim this as a new issue. These tests were done within the last month.

TLTR: Genesis games run fine on RetroPie 4.6, but lag on 4.7 and later versions. Updating on RetroPie 4.6 (apt update and apt upgrade) also results in lag.

pi@retropie ~ % cat /sys/firmware/devicetree/base/model
Raspberry Pi 2 Model B Rev 1.2

I made pre-made SD Image from RetroPie website: retropie-buster-4.8-rpi2_3_zero2w.img and other similar images listed below

USB Devices
(Tested: None of these are required to generate the errors.)

LaCie Porsche 8TB external HDD
NetGear A6150 wifi adaptor
Mini Keyboard (2.4 GHz)
Lobkin 8 channel powered USB
Retro-Bit Sega Megadrive 8-Button Arcade Pad (2.4 GHz)
Refurbished MacBook SuperDrive in USB enclosure

The television is a Vizio. However, the RPi was also tested on an all-in-one Dell computer using its monitor.

As I finally found the issue changing RetroPie versions exactly, I will omit other things like my power supply, etc.

Lag in lr-genesis-plus (tested with Sonic the Hedgehog):

retropie-buster-4.8-rpi2_3_zero2w.img
retropie-buster-4.7.1-rpi2_3.img.gz
retropie-buster-4.7-rpi2_rpi3.img.gz

Works:

retropie-buster-4.6-rpi2_rpi3.img.gz
(older versions...)

However, when using RetroPie 4.6 and issuing apt update and apt upgrade, lr-genesis-plus becomes laggy.

I am happy to post any kind of error log files from 4.8 (present build) or I could install 4.6, 4.7, etc and post log files. However, I have no idea what log files will be useful. It is probably an issue with the operating system itself. I hope having demonstrating where the bug occurs (between 4.6 and 4.7) is useful to help isolate this issue.

dankcushions

@daid for pi2 you should probably use lr-picodrive, not lr-genesis-plus-gx, as per my original reply to this.

perhaps we should change defaults for pi2 if it can't handle genesis-plus-gx at default settings in current versions (emulators tend to get slower over time as they become more accurate - note that later versions of retropie have later versions of the emulators/different emulator default settings). if you want to help verify this, please fill in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first, including verbose log, with a specific example of a game you find slow, slowing down.

MiroKostovBG

Hello All,
I'm dealing today with the same issue but my investigation shows so far that for me it is only related to PAL MD games

I opened a separate threat here with some more research : https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/34696/megadrive-50hz-games-with-genesis

The problem that I have if I use 1980 x 1020 @ 50Hz is that the monitor for whatever reason has black borders all around and I experience this on PI4B