Increase performance on a old RPi 1B?

Kelemvor

Howdy,

Had RetroPie on my RPi1B a long time ago and just installed the latest version. I fired up Super Mario Bros on NES and the game barely played. I overclocked to "High" and it made it a little better but was still poor. I tried Turbo but then Emulation Station wouldn't ever load up all the way.

I'm powering it with a 2A cord that came with my GS5 or GS7 phone so it should be powerful enough I'd think.

I'm just wondering if there are recommended settings to change to try to get more performance out of this little guy. I saw someone mention changing the resolution which I haven't done yet since I'm at work but wondering if there's any other options to try. Or maybe I need to go back to an older version of RetroPie?

Thanks!

Note: Something needs to be changed as it took my 20 minutes to figure out how the hell to add a tag. Had to put Firefox into Fullscreen mode just to see it. That doesn't seem right. And now that I'm adding more to my post it's off the screen and gone again.

obsidianspider

What version of RetroPie? What emulator? What kind of SD card are you running? Did you actually read the post at the top of the page that you had to agree that you read before you could post?

Kelemvor

@obsidianspider Did you bother to actually read my post?

Here, I'll help you find what you're asking for.

"just installed the latest version" That would be 4.1
"Super Mario Bros on NES" That would the default Nintendo emulator
The Read First post doesn't ask for SD card info but it's an 8 gig class 10 card. I used the ISO from the retropie website.
Controller is an xbox 360 type controller from walmart

Does that help?

obsidianspider

@Kelemvor Yes, I did read your post.

RetroPie is constantly being updated, so "latest version" isn't really a thing. Depending on when you last ran the update, things could have changed.

I asked about the SD card because slow SD cards can be a performance bottleneck.

Without knowing which specific emulator you're running, it's tough to diagnose.

Good luck with your Pi.

cyperghost

@Kelemvor Can you please provide more info about your Pi?
The Pi1B gots two version the v1 with 256MB and the v2 with 512MB RAM.

Yes you can always try to overclock from 700MHz to 900MHz up to 1100 MHz. Please care that the old Pi aren't always stable in overclocking the newer B+ version (with 40 GPIO Pin header) can better overclocked. The power supply is okay and should fullfill your needs

The Pi1 can is okay for most 16bit systems SNES games with special FX chip (like... StarWing, Yoshis Island...) can lack speed. NeoGeo games sometimes lack (Metal Slug for ex). The MegaDrive/Genesis runs flawless and PSX in general runs smooth.

rbaker

@Kelemvor said in Increase performance on a old RPi 1B?:

That would the default Nintendo emulator

Which one?

@Kelemvor said in Increase performance on a old RPi 1B?:

I used the ISO from the retropie website

This is funny. Which one exactly? Name it. You would be surprised that people download the wrong one.

Good Luck.

pi_guy

I'm having the same issue on nes. it has to be an issue with the image, cause using the same hardware with v1.9 it runs fine. Is there any way to downgrade the nes emulator or make it less bloated?

BuZz

@pi_guy Open a new topic - also please do not post a support request without first reading and following the advice in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

trafsta

@Kelemvor I'm very new to Retropie (few weeks) but now use three Raspberry Pi 3's as my main systems for my family, but the first Raspberry Pi I had tried Retropie on before buying Rasp Pi 3's was the original Rasp Pi (a '0' or possibly a '1' or whatever the very first version was called) . Running the latest version of Retropie (as of about 2 weeks ago) my NES games ran slow... and I did the same thing as you and tried overclocking, and while that helped it still wasn't great. However, the simple way for me to fix it was to press a button when loading up any NES rom and configure your video settings to something lower like 640x480... after that it ran all my NES games very smoothly. I still use this same Raspberry Pi for just NES/SNES/Genesis games, works well for those older systems.

Again, I'm new to all of this, but I'm betting this will solve your issue.

BuZz

@trafsta by default the rpi0/1 image has retroarch render resolution set to 640x480 so it should be fine out of the box (just need to add a medium overclock).

Older images were "overclocked" by default, but we leave it up to the user now so that might be why they thought older versions were quicker. There should not be any performance decrease.

trafsta

@BuZz Well maybe I set it down to 320x240 then, I can't remember for sure. All I know is that Retropie 4.1 installed on my first gen RaspPi around 2-3 weeks ago, even when overclocked, was slow (music sounded funky)... and I remember lowering the resolution to fix it... sound/music was smooth after lowing the video res. I can check in a few days to see what resolution I set it to. Worth a shot for these guys to see if it fixes their problem. Other systems, like Genesis, worked fine without messing around with the video res. Very cool to have my 1st gen Rasp Pi useful again though. I stopped using it for Kodi years ago so it was just collecting dust.

pi_guy

Thanks for the suggestion, but I already tried lowing the resolution to 320x240 and it didn't make a difference performance wise for me. Are you sure you don't have a pi 2? Easy way to tell is the pi 1 only has 2 usb ports, pi 2 and 3 have 4.

This isn't a made up problem, i've seen multiple posts here and on reddit but no real answers. I know how to overclock the pi, and i know the old images were overclocked by default. The only way i've found to run nes games full speed is the turbo OC, but that will freeze the system after a few mins.

Medium OC definately doesn't cut it with 4.1. I suggest you try it yourself with a p 1 B model if you still don't believe me.

BuZz

@pi_guy I run a 4.1 on a pi1 downstairs and last time i checked nes was full speed - I dont think my overclock was at turbo levels.

pi_guy

@BuZz this is with default image settings except for medium OC? it just seems like something is wrong when i can run snes and mame games at full speed while nes struggles with super mario bros.

trafsta

Just to clarify yes I have 2 USB ports on my Rasp Pi.

I reinstalled 4.1 on it yesterday and am currently copying a rom collection back over to it. I'll try to check tonight to see if they run smoothly or not.