How to use Overclock and Mupen Core Options to significantly increase 64 game playability, quality, and stability

Riverstorm

@Rion said in How to use Overclock and Mupen Core Options to significantly increase 64 game playability, quality, and stability:

From my findings Ceramic Heatsinks from Farnell cost from 0.9 to 8.89 $..

The price is definitely right. I usually wait and buy several things at once just to keep the shipping costs down. What's that saying "Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is certainly the father." Something like that! :)

Prindle19

@Riverstorm Ah, thanks - actually, it looks like this was configured - i was able to exit roms, I just wasn't getting notifications that it was saving state like it does in other emulators (yellow overlay)

Twitch0815

@Rion
Been reading and reading and reading, ceramic might in fact be better however with my current setup, Epoxy, Aluminum heatsinks, jtek acrylic case with active fan and the overclock I push the chip is cool to the touch. Honestly power and the architecture are the only things preventing clocking higher. If I can figure out how to continue pushing the overvolt to get gains in v3d_freq which is the only thing that needs to go up. Honestly there is so much cpu overhead even in n64 games with high texture packs enabled you do not need more then 1350 arm_freq what we need for NDS, Saturn, better dreamcast and 64 is more v3d processing power. Long run hopefully the pi 4 has a much improved upgraded video chip and 2GB of ram but with what we have now I cant get v3d up above 525. And I honestly do not think it is heat, but I am going to try an immersion cooling setup. Basically dunking the whole thing in mineral oil. There is some intresting studies I have read about how the pi is designed itself as a heatsink the pcb draws heat from the cpu down into the pcb bare board or something like that. But results are results I overclock the shit out of mine and my temp does not raise above 50C.

mrbwa1

@Twitch0815 My biggest problem with heat sinks is that there is not true mounting like on a PC motherboard, so you are at the mercy of whatever heat transfer compound you are using. The mineral oil both might not be a bad idea. Heck, distilled water with a radiator should work fine too. You are also hitting the limits of the RAM more than anything else. It seems like there just isn't much overhead for higher speed there.

In reality, you hit the nail on the head. The emulator coding is the bottleneck more than anything else. Perhaps, if the Videocore IV driver was open source, maybe some hardware acceleration could be done which would likely benefit all models of Pi.

I like your setup and honestly, if I wanted to push one, I would probably find a nice big low rpm, high volume fan to keep airflow moving over it somewhat quietly. Not sure how necessary the small heatsinks are at that point.

But hey, if you want to go for crazy, mount a temp probe over the chips and analyze with an external MCU that triggers a solenoid to give a shot of compressed air from a can at a certain threshold: Instant hypercooling.

Rion

@Twitch0815 @mrbwa1 @Riverstorm
Found this video a couple of days ago and I must say this is the best solution so far for mounting a big Heat Spreader I have seen.

When I do this modification I'm going to use a large ceramic heat spreader from farnell.

scrappbrapp

@Twitch0815 , I'm the new guy here, but I want to say thank you for this effort you made.

I made a post asking for some 1-on-1 help (https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/1860/could-someone-check-my-work-if-i-m-overclocking-my-pi3-correctly-focusing-on-tweaking-pi-best-for-retropie) and then I found this thread and went ahead and changed up my boot/config to match your settings. I figured its easier to mimic someone who is digging pretty hard into raspi specifically for retropie, instead of general overclock settings. The change felt noticeable, but I still have an issue with retropie freezing after 10 minutes or so of any n64 game.
EDIT the 10ft 24awg cable WAS the cause of my freezing. I swapped in a 6ft cable with identical specs as the 10ft (I bought multiple cables to test) and the freezing went away.
I just have heatsinks (attached by thermal adhesive), and an open air case. Temps after 40 mins inside N64 was 56c. (I just exited retropie as fast as I could and input the temp command... so there is some variance, Im sure.) Temps without the overclock are about 42c, and temps with OC inside SNES are about 52c.

I have 2 questions:

Can these overclock settings (or do overclock settings at all) help weed out some "input lag" or "boggy" issues in NES, and SNES games?
(IE: Super Mario World for SNES, trying to do a quick jump/flick of fireballs/yoshi's tongue turns into a weird combination of backwards input normally found from the actual SNES, while also being performed at some exact lagged input that feels unnatural. River City Ransom for NES on the other hand, plays noticeably boggy in 2 player, compared to 1 player.)
If an overclock can't do much good for NES/SNES, is there a command to tell raspi to NOT overclock unless it needs the extra power?

Thank you for any help, and again, your effort you put forward.

PetroRie

@Rion That heatsink is just a simple southbridge heatsink. You can get them on eBay for a couple bucks with a 5v fan. I'm going to get one soon and see how far I can overclock it.

scrappbrapp

I would like to keep this thread active, so I'm going to put some updated info:

Just to go ahead and make sure I had no loose ends and to simplify any doubts:
o I went ahead and swapped out the 16ft HDMI cable, and 6ft USB cable w/correct rated quality wall charger, to a 3ft HDMI cable, and an official Pi charger. I now use 10ft USB extension cables for my controllers instead. (I just dont think this was required- but it gives me peace of mind that everything HAS to be "correct" now.)
o I have yet to complete the case w/fan so for now I placed a small desk fan over the Pi. Temperatures do not rise above 40c while gaming.
o I am also starting to up the video resolution for some games to "CEA-4", while also upping frame buffer resolution to 960x720. (This doesn't work all the time.. but I'm just finding a few that are playing nice (no pun intended) with higher resolution. With that in mind, I'm assuming a "stock" CEA-1 choice with the following settings.)

As for my overclock settings, the only changes I have from the original post are:
arm_freq=1450
over_voltage=6
v3d_freq=525
core_freq=550

I put my over_voltage back to 6 since I recently changed my v3d & core freq. arm=1450 plays fine with voltage=5, so at some point I would like to lower it again, just to not be on the edge... Arm=1500 does NOT like voltage=5. I have yet to try 4.
Honestly, I haven't felt any improvements when I run arm=1500, and I also continue to get lockups after extensive play on some stuff with 1500. (This is why I bought an actual Pi charger, but that was not the problem/solution.) Frankly I dont even know if arm=1450 is worth it. The settings in the original post might be honestly the best you can get. (No matter what I do, track 2 on FzeroX, the high speed ring, just plays like total crap.)
I haven't even felt a difference with upping v3d and core even higher. Core at 600 just causes stutter big time on games that usually run fine.
I wish I knew enough myself to figure out if the solution is more overclock on GPU & RAM.

2stick

Sorry to gravedig, but it seems this is still the most detailed thread on the subject of N64 optimizations.

I'm wondering if the mupen64 settings are still valid as of RetroPie 4.1? As well as Glide being the default plugin, and CEA-1 being the default resolution? Or should we be using something else?

dankcushions

@2stick said in How to use Overclock and Mupen Core Options to significantly increase 64 game playability, quality, and stability:

Sorry to gravedig, but it seems this is still the most detailed thread on the subject of N64 optimizations.

I'm wondering if the mupen64 settings are still valid as of RetroPie 4.1? As well as Glide being the default plugin, and CEA-1 being the default resolution? Or should we be using something else?

no need to to the CEA-1 stuff anymore. resolutions are set to native (320x240) by both mupen64-glideN64 and lr-glupen64.

loganmc10

no need to to the CEA-1 stuff anymore. resolutions are set to native (320x240) by both mupen64-glideN64 and lr-glupen64.

I don't use RetroPie, but setting it to CEA-1 is still a good idea, even though the emulators are now rendering at 320x240 by default, the graphics card still needs to "upscale" the image from 320x240 to whatever the Pi's resolution is, so setting a lower resolution (CEA-1) could still help performance. With that said tho, the graphics card upscaling is a pretty light-weight task, so I don't know how much of a difference it would make.

pjft

@Twitch0815 I hate to gravedig x2, but I am curious about your insights into Dreamcast as that's the one that has been eluding me. :)

elacon225

I tried both over clocking and the mupen options listed and I cannot get 007 or Rush 2049 to play properly. Any ideas?

the496rocket

I opened the /boot/config.txt but not all the values are there to change, cannot find V3D to change, do I need to manually add that or something? also where do I find all the options for mugen to change? or do I need to add those as well? I opened that file that it shows and its very short and there are none of those settings displayed for me to change.

Sorry I am VERY new to retropie