Asus Tinker Board

Rotarum

Hi BuZz,

did you get it work with RetroPie ?? :)

And is it much faster than PI 3 ?

If yes i will buy one...

BuZz

@Rotarum I will update when I have news. There is no timeline for this.

Rotarum

@BuZz ok Thanks :) Hopefully you can test it soon when you have time...

Jake

ASUS announced yesterday they are now selling the tinker board in North America ...

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/asus-releases-tinker-board-single-board-computer-in-north-america/

memothejanitor

Hi all, I just received my Tinker Board.

Tinker OS is pretty much the only OS that booted right off the bat. Tinker Board is certainly faster than the Pi, however I am not sure how much that matters to some of us.

I will do some testing and report back.

hannibal

hey guys. just joined that community. Bought a Pi3 a week ago. loved it so much went to buy another today and bought the tinkerboard instead. found a video of someone getting retroarch to work anyone have any luck finding out he did it?

memothejanitor

I think ETA Prime has a video on it. Search it on YouTube. It is buggy, though. I don't assume we'll be able to use the Tinker Board anytime soon.

KryPtAlIvIaN

I bought one yesterday, and managed to get retroarch on it. I like it alot, but the image is still in beta and has issues. Once it gets hardware acceleration, I think things will run alot better then.

I also compiled Mednafen multi emulator and it runs a little better.

hannibal

@KryPtAlIvIaN how did you get retroarch to work? Any videos you watched on how to make it work? Or did you put one on youtube?

hannibal

@memothejanitor yeah I think I watched that video but he is just showing how the roms are playing. He doesn't explain how he got arch to work..... I don't think

mab1376

Has anyone tried the retropie image on the tinker board? does it boot at all?

does this work? https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/RetroPie-Ubuntu-16.04-LTS-x86-Flavor

is tinker OS debian based as well?

BuZz

@mab1376 no. tinker board will require code changes.

hannibal

@mab1376 I believe the os is debian based

Charononus

@hannibal
Not all debian bases are equal. There could be several differences. For instance I played with retropie on mx16 for a while to see what it would be like. Because all the libraries and compilers aren't the same, some things such as dolphin in that case wouldn't compile without changes. It can probably be done, but it's going to take a bit of work.

mab1376

@Charononus

Ok thanks, I'll probably pick one up soon if any needs testers. Seems like a good upgrade in hardware performance, maybe n64 will run a little better on it.

mxstar1

they are $59 on amazon, I got one. Time to play around! No Pi 4 for some time..this should be the next thing until then, if it can get some support

hannibal

Still no news on how anyone got retroarch to work?

hydroxide

I don't want to bother you guys but is there any chance that we'll have a working build around November? It seems that the Tinker Board is the next big SBC because the Foundation is focusing on software for now and I don't think they'll release a new board for a while.

herb_fargus

@hydroxide specs mean nothing if there is no software support. Any development is done as there is free time and as such there is no eta for support.

knuxyliblis

@herb_fargus said in Asus Tinker Board:

@hydroxide specs mean nothing if there is no software support. Any development is done as there is free time and as such there is no eta for support.

There isn't as much of a need for software support since the software so stable since launch, and there appears to be active development from ASUS on both Android and Debian.

I tried multiple things to get Retropie to work.

I managed to get it installed with these two commands

sudo __platform=armv7-mali ./retropie_setup.sh
and
sudo __platform-generic-x11 ./retropie_setup.sh

I would prefer the armv7-mali (since RK3288 is using Mali-T764) but Retropie keeps asking for mali-fbdev package from apt-get and it is not available. Booting into command line and starting emulationstation ends up with Unable to initialize video (SDL2) (something like that). I'm assuming it's the mali-fbdev missing package that caused this.

If someone could explain what mali-fbdev is, where I can find the source for it, and how to go about compiling it for my system, I could probably get Retropie working.

For generic-x11 install, everything works excluding some emulator builds. Mupen64plus gives error about not being to find stubs-soft.h therefore the core library file isn't created, and some arcade emulators or something (i don't know the errors on those). I looked into the stubs-soft.h and read some documentation on Mupen64plus and it seems I need to set some flags for using hard floats instead (since stubs-hard.h is present) but I have no idea what file to add these flags to in Retropie.

Also generic-x11 isn't ideal since it has to be ran inside an already running X11 environment. It probably wouldn't be a problem since the specs of the Tinker Board are so good, but still not ideal.

Retroarch build from source and install from repo both give a Segmentation Fault on launch. I don't know what that's about. It built fine. Kodi has problems with videos (top and bottom of video are transparent where black should be, might've just been my system). Mupen64plus won't compile without Retropie too, I don't remember why, there were a lot of errors.

So seeing this generic-x11 and armv7-mali platforms as choices in Retropie, support for the Tinker Board would not be too difficult. There's two ways to go about it (I prefer the first)

Regardless, there needs to be better platform identification.

But they could either figure out what video device files the tinker board uses outside of x11 (I saw some packages that had mali in the name, just no mali-fbdev)
or
Fix the flags for compiling emulators on generic-x11.

Also, on generic-x11, when trying to launch the Retropie Setup within emulationstation, it will just say Can't recognize platform, please manually set __platform, but I have no idea where to do that. It works for running the script from a git clone, but not within emulationstation.

And to herb, specs should mean everything, that's where the support should go to. Not support should go to where support is. This board is incredibly faster than the Pi 3. I have both and I'm switching permanently because of the much faster hardware. When I had Debian installed, I got Netflix and Hulu working too so much better than Pi 3. I have Android running on this thing already and it took forever for the RPi to do that. ASUS is keeping up with the software on it, now we just need the community to jump on board as well.

So technically, official support is there. The 3rd party communities just need to branch away from the RPi 3 until they come out with something faster. Since everything already works on Retropie (for the most part), considering how much effort was put into it, I would assume they have plenty of time to add support for this device. It wouldn't take much effort, especially considering they got this thing to run with crap videocore gpus.

EDIT

I forgot to mention that generic-x11 also does not show any of the emulators in emulationstation, only the retropie setup section. A lot of emulators built successfully, but did not show up. I don't know what would cause that.