Mupen64plus (N64) emulator doesn't work, falls back to emulationstation

[Peeteris]

I have

RaspberryPi 3B, with RetroPie 4.8;
did sudo apt-get update and upgrade.
Overclocked (but it never was an issue, using this particular RaspberryPi with overclock settings from 2017.)
Connected with 3,5mm to a CRT TV, using tweakvec's PAL60 mode.

Problem:
Nintendo 64 games doesn't start with any mupen64 emulator, falls back to emulationstation, and I can't seem to find a reason why.

gliden64.log after every try to open a game shows this:

2023/07/25,19:08:45.148,opengl_GLInfo.cpp:163,WARNING, "Async color buffer copies are not supported on GLES2"
2023/07/25,19:08:45.148,opengl_GLInfo.cpp:169,WARNING, "LOD emulation not possible on this device"

I'm pretty distraught and really pray for any help from you.
Thank you!

[mitu]

Can you post the entire log file from running a N64 ROM (/dev/shm/runcommand.log) on pastebin.com ?

[Peeteris]

@mitu said in Mupen64plus (N64) emulator doesn't work, falls back to emulationstation:

/dev/shm/runcommand.log

Yes, here it is:
https://pastebin.com/1mMZAGxn

[mitu]

Not much in the log, unfortunately.
Did it always work like this or is this a recent issue ? Any configuration changes on your system that you did recently ?

[Peeteris]

@mitu Yes, I used this RaspberryPi connected through HDMI, now I use it connected to CRT.
I made runcommand-onstart and runcommand-onend, so it switches back and forth to interlaced/progressive signals.
Disabling these doesn't change a thing.

Also made new additions to cmdline:

rootwait loglevel=3 consoleblank=0 plymouth.enable=0 cma=400M logo.nologo

Changing CMA and allocated RAM for GPU also didn't change a thing.

[mitu]

@Peeteris said in Mupen64plus (N64) emulator doesn't work, falls back to emulationstation:

I made runcommand-onstart and runcommand-onend, so it switches back and forth to interlaced/progressive signals.

I think runcommand can already do that without any additional scripts, tweakvec should only be needed for PAL60 support switching. Also, the cmdline additions are not needed for running games.

I don't have a CRT to test - does the libretro core - lr-mupen64plus - works ?

[Peeteris]

@mitu not sure about runcommand, because before that if i added progressive to runcommand, it didn't switch back to interlaced when in emulationstation. So started to use onstart and onend to switch between interlaced/progressive.

Yes, i'm using tveakec for PAL60.
Cmdline additions are for kodi, so pi doesn't show logs on black background, when watching 16:9 content on 4:3 screen (letterbox).

Yes, libretro core works, but it's slow and buggy, though.

[Peeteris]

for example, when Super Mario 64 starts, it flashes garbled, small Nintendo logo on top left corner for a half a second.

No, it's just a text of switching from interlaced to progressive that's cropped and garbled. Emu shows yellow text that it starts to load textures and af ter that - back to emulationstation.

I think this is also somehow related to that Reicast for me also shuts off at the moment when game have to playback video.

But at the same time there's an error in runcommand about audio output?

Any ideas? 😕

[Peeteris]

I'm also sure, that before latest updates N64 worked. Something changed with the updates to these cores?

[mitu]

@Peeteris said in Mupen64plus (N64) emulator doesn't work, falls back to emulationstation:

Something changed with the updates to these cores?

Not much has changed, I've checked for any recent updates that may have broken the emulator when it was reported in this topic, but haven't found any outstanding change. Perhaps your issue is similar - i.e. not related to the video output via CRT.

[Peeteris]

@mitu Seems so, that these problems are related. Maybe there are any other tests I could make to find the problem or the solution?

[mitu]

@Peeteris said in Mupen64plus (N64) emulator doesn't work, falls back to emulationstation:

Maybe there are any other tests I could make to find the problem or the solution?

You can run mupen64plus with the -verbose flag and see where it stops, but that's just a first step into diagnosing the issue. I'll take a closer look to see what's up with the latest version.

[Peeteris]

@mitu I found gliden64.log in /opt/retropie/configs/n64/mupen64plus.
It shows these lines with different dates, every time I tried to run a game:

2023/08/11,12:32:28.325,opengl_GLInfo.cpp:163,WARNING, "Async color buffer copies are not supported on GLES2"
2023/08/11,12:32:28.327,opengl_GLInfo.cpp:169,WARNING, "LOD emulation not possible on this device"

---

Also, how do I tur on verbose logging for this emulator as it's not Libretro core? Actually found this gliden64 log file while trying to figure out how to enable vebose flag.

[mitu]

@Peeteris said in Mupen64plus (N64) emulator doesn't work, falls back to emulationstation:

Also, how do I tur on verbose logging for this emulator as it's not Libretro core?

Yeah, forgot about that. It needs to go in the emulator start script - but that won't be necessary. I have reproduced the issue, I just have to pinpoint exactly when the upstream project added the faulty code that triggers this error.

[BuZz]

@mitu I have restored older binaries from before the issue now.

So re-installing from binary should now restore working versions until we have a proper fix - thanks for looking into this.

[dankcushions]

looks like this has been fixed upstream: https://github.com/mupen64plus/mupen64plus-core/pull/1027

source compiles should now work :)

thanks all for reporting! @mitu, thanks for reporting upstream, and @BuZz thanks for that, hopefully you can use later binaries, once fix is confirmed :)