My Raspberry Pi 3 voyage thus far...

cardula

Hi everyone!

Two months ago today I embarked on a journey that I've been wanting to take for a long time: setting up a Raspberry Pi 3 as an gaming machine for my living room with PS3 controllers and Wii U Pro Controllers both set up via Bluetooth. During this journey, I've faced throttling, under-voltage, freezing, phantom input, a dead SD card, and file system corruption that caused EmulationStation to longer load at boot. This is a summary of where I'm at now, how I got there, and how I overcame hurdles along the way. I hope my story can help someone out who's had similar issues to me!

For those who TL;DR, here's my current setup:
-Raspberry Pi3
-Flirc case
-~~Kingston 128GB SDCX10/128GBSP (soon to be Samsung EVO 32GB MB-MP32DA/Am)~~
-Samsung 32GB EVO Plus MB-MC32/TR
-Enokay Power Supply for Raspberry Pi 5V 2.5A Micro USB Charger Adapter with On Off Switch
-a self powered 4 port standard USB 2.0 hub
-A mix of PS3 and Wii U Pro Controllers, all working via Bluetooth
-Mayflash Wii U Pro Controller wireless adaptor
-64GB USB drive for roms
-edited /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg to load my roms off the USB drive
-The following lines added to my /boot/config.txt file:
over_voltage=4
v3d_freq=500
gpu_freq=500
gpu_mem=450
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=500
~~dtparam=sd_overclock=100~~

Firstly, I purchased the CanaKit, which included everything one would need to get started. The case and provided heat sinks didn't do a very good job of cooling, as I was getting the thermometer symbol and throttling when installing ppsspp from source, and when playing GBA games with smoothing enabled. I now use the Flirc case, which is awesome. My temps have never gone above 65, even when compiling or playing heavy games on N64 or PSP. However, as many others have stated, PSP and N64 has been hit and miss, mostly miss, which I'm fine with. I had to return the CanaKit due to both the overheating along with the SD card failing. The card went into permanent read-only mode less than a month after I bought it, with minimal use. Lastly, I was able to make backups and cleanly install RetroPie using Win32 Disc Imager and the included USB-micro SD card adapter, but I would always get CRC errors upon attempting to restore from backup. So, I would not recommend buying the CanaKit.

The next SD card I tried was a Kingston 128GB SDCX10/128GBSP. It's a decent card; however, it's not a good card for the Pi. I was having random 2-5 second freezing/lags with CD based games (PC Engine, SegaCD, PS1, etc), and random lags when choosing which game to load, and other random lag in general. After a month of heavy use and the file system became corrupted. I had read that this is can happen with larger cards, so it came as no surprise. I used SD card formatter to format it and EaseUS Partition Master Free to format it from exFAT to FAT32. I currently have a Samsung EVO 32GB MB-MP32DA/Am on the way from Amazon, and I plan to use the Kingston 128GB card elsewhere. Lesson learned.

I now run all of my games from a USB drive, and have had no issues. Instead of mounting /home/pi/RetroPie/roms to my usb drive like many others have, I edited /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg and changed the path line to match the folder on my USB drive. For example, for PS1, I changed it from <path>/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/psx</path> to <path>/media/usb0/psx</path> (your USB drive may be labelled differently to mine).

For controllers, I've never had the freezing issue that some have complained about with a PS3 controller and the custom Bluetooth driver. However, I was having random phantom input from a Wii U Pro Controller using the on-board Bluetooth with the stock driver that comes installed with RetroPie. When I tried using a the Wii U Pro Controller on Bluetooth combined with wired PS3 controllers, the phantom input increased over 100x, and made RetroPie unusable. Thanks to advice from @MEGAFACEHEAD, I now use the Mayflash USB adapter for the Wii U Pro Controller in XInput mode, which the Pi detects as a 360 controller. I currently have the PS3 custom Bluetooth driver installed, and I can finally use my Wii U Pro Controllers and PS3 controllers at the same time!

Lastly, I've played with overclocking a bit, not including any overclocking of the CPU. I may try that at some point, but since I'm happy with what RetroPie does, to me, the risk isn't worth it.

UPDATE: It's now been 2 weeks since I got the Samsung EVO card, and so far so good! I removed the SD card overclock from config.txt because I'm getting better performance without it than I ever got with the Kingston card.

I hope this story helps someone out there. It's been a lot of work and I haven't had this much fun playing around with tech in a really long time.

edmaul69

@cardula your card corruption is most likely due to being a kingston card and not the size. If the samsung evo card is not a chinese fake that they sell by the boatload on ebay and amazon then it will work great. If it is a fake it probably will only be an 8-16 card that will corrupt as soon as you try to go past the "real actual size".

Darksavior

@cardula I heard the pi is picky about the 128GB cards it can support. I'm using a 32GB kingston with no issues and using a 128GB usb stick for roms with the altered emulationstation cfg you also did.

backstander

@cardula that's quite a journey! I hope you have the rights for the Made for TV Movie!

My first time, I also purchased the CanaKit and I didn't have any issues with the 32GB microSD card but I later picked up a 64GB card from BestBuy and I think it is a little bit thicker than that 32GB because after I used it with the included USB card reader, it broke the USB card reader and the 32GB would just fall out of it. It won't even read the 64GB card anymore.

I now have a 128GB USB flash drive which doesn't have the lag like the large microSD cards have.

I also edit my es_systems.cfg like you but you'll probably want to copy it to ~/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg because every time you update RetroPie, /etc/emulationstation/es_systems.cfg gets overwritten with the default values so you'll loose your <path>/media/usb0/psx</path>:
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/EmulationStation/#editing-es-configs

cardula

@edmaul69 I had no idea there were so many fake cards around, thanks for letting me know. I agree, it was probably due to it being a Kingston card.

So, my file system again became corrupted today. Luckily, my new card came in the mail today, so the timing was perfect. I got a different card than what I ordered (different from what was on the packing slip). The good news is, it's an upgrade and according to the wiki, it works better than the one I was supposed to get. I ended up getting a Samsung 32GB EVO Plus MB-MC32/TR. Has anyone else here used this card before? If so, how was your experience?

edmaul69

@cardula im not sure about your card but i use a 64gb evo in my apple iie pi and a 16gb evo in my playstation 1 pi. They work great. So if your card is legit it should work great.

dankcushions

your sdram overclocks could cause sd corruption too i think. possibly the overvoltage also. personally i'd remove all forms of overclocking if you're seeing corruption/instability.