Emulating a Pi... try before I buy!
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@herb_fargus All I can say is 'Amen to that Brother!!' I think of this as a hobby and digging thru the docs is relaxing. If I uncover a nugget of wisdom I try to spread the word. Thanks for all the time and effort you admin guys put into this project.
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Well, I took your advice and spent £50 on a pi kit. The retropie software is very smart. The installation and ability to copy the roms using a USB stick is very easy. You can get up and running very quickly.
On the down side, I don't know if the 360 controller driver is reliable on the pi. I have had problems with the community made 360 drivers on the mac, maybe the pi is the same. Or maybe I just don't know how to use retropie (I am totally new to retropie). I have only had one evening with retropie, but with all 3 emulators that I have tried pc engine, vectrex and atari 2600. I have to randomly mash the controller buttons to get a game to start from the game title screen. The vectrex sound is more bursts of white noise - maybe that is what the real console sounds like, or maybe my roms are all corrupt. And a couple of times I could not exit a vectrex rom. The rom was still running but I could not use start and select button to exit to the menu. None of the controller buttons did anything. I had to pull the power cord out of the pi. I am sure that is not good for the pi!
It would be nice to have retropie in an emulator so that I could test controllers and test roms very quickly and easily. It would also be good so that I could test out different configuration options. I am worried about pulling the power cable out of the pi too often. I guess it could corrupt the operating system files/memory card.
p.s. I am using a genuine microsoft wired 360 controller which works 100% flawlessly on the PC with all my steam games.
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@CargoRunner said in Emulating a Pi... try before I buy!:
Here's the dig in part Herb mentioned. ;P You have a lot going on there. I use both wired and wireless (with official XBOX dongle) controllers and they DO work flawlessly on the RetroPie too! The 2600 no issues either. Played both for hours. I haven't used PC or Vectrex. It might not be your controller it might be the emulator itself causing the issue.
When my controller was lagging in response to input (like exiting an emulator) I believe it was a power issue with a 3 meter USB cable for me. I just had funky stuff happening. You might have something else going on like a config issue or a combination of something. Watch the upper right hand corner of the screen for a square. Different colors mean different things.
Make a backup of your Pi image for restoring and pull the power until you get your controller working to do a proper shutdown. I don't think you can wreck the Pi itself (I've seen the power connector itself come loose from the board from excessive plugging and unplugging so I unplug from the wall) but you can corrupt the image which isn't a big deal.
You might have to research Vectrex or Youtube to see if it was white noise on the original, verify your ROMs with a ROM manager.
I am not sure why you would need a Pi emulator. I setup WinSCP and Putty on a laptop (or a desktop if you want) while playing. It allows you to dump files, tweak configs, everything you need in seconds from your PC while using an actual Pi which is better than an emulator it's the real deal.
There's 10's of thousands of hours of combined experience in all emulators on the forums and if it can't be fixed you have a seriously unique issue. Once you get everything setup and configured it's amazing and worth the effort.
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@CargoRunner said in Emulating a Pi... try before I buy!:
I don't know if the 360 controller driver is reliable on the pi.
Have you enabled 'xboxdrv' through the RetroPie setup menu?
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Setting-up-the-XBox360-controller
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OK problem solved! I have the official raspberry pi kit, which comes with a 2.5 power supply. But with two 360 controllers and a memory stick plugged in to pi the controller input is not reliable.
If I have a single 360 controller plugged in, I can play games reliably. Pressing start on the controller actually starts the game!
If I plug everything in again, it is hard to start a game. The start button doesn't seem to work and I have to randomly mash buttons on the controller. Weird!
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@CargoRunner Glad to hear you got it sorted out!! Powering the Pi with a usb charger is right on the harry edge as we use'd ta say. Also folks don't think things like controllers or keyboards or mice take power.
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The PI external power is very minimal. One thing I HIGHLY recommend for any PI user is a powered USB hub, even if to natively isolate your PI. Xbox controllers SUCK huge amounts of power because you are running LEDs, motors, etc.
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@monel_funkawitz said in Emulating a Pi... try before I buy!:
The PI external power is very minimal. One thing I HIGHLY recommend for any PI user is a powered USB hub, even if to natively isolate your PI. Xbox controllers SUCK huge amounts of power because you are running LEDs, motors, etc.
They should still be limited to the USB 2.0 power output spec (which is around 500 mA depending on manufacturer) but probably less as nothing is 100 efficient so that drops it down probably another 10 or 20% of usable power. I've never had an issue using four wired 360 controllers with the recommended power supply. You could always go wireless and leave the power draw on the controller save for the dongle. :/
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@Riverstorm How much power does the wireless dongle draw?
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@glennlake said in Emulating a Pi... try before I buy!:
@Riverstorm How much power does the wireless dongle draw?
I don't know for sure. I could take a look at the receiver tonight to see if it lists any power specs. I know it lists USB 2.0 as a requirement but the actual draw I'm not to sure.
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