Retropie on RockPro64. Initial observations.

pitcrawler

I used a Rock64 fork of the Retropie-Setup that I found here to get it up and running (with a little effort) on my new RockPro64 board. I was previously using a Raspberry Pi 3, so that's what I was going to be comparing it to.

So far I've installed and tried emulators for the Sega Megadrive/Genesis, PSX, Arcade, Atari Jaguar. I mainly wanted to try those last three to check the performance, since the Raspberry Pi had difficulty with some of those.

From what I've seen, some arcade roms that didn't work well on my Raspberry Pi do work much better on the RockPro64 with the fbalpha emulator. I still need to test some of the more recent ones. I only tested one PSX game so far but it looks like it ran at full speed pretty much.

For the Atari Jaguar using the Virtualjaguar emulator, I was surprised to find that some roms ran much at playable speeds compared to with the Raspberry Pi.

Unfortunately some of emulators just don't work or aren't compatible. Mupen64plus for N64 emulation isn't compatible, and the other experimental N64 emulator just doesn't work even though it compiles. Some of the other arcade emulators don't seem to work. I've only got fbalpha to play anything. Kodi can't be installed through Retropie, but I did install it separately from outside of Retropie-Setup.

I'm going to assume that all of the emulators from the 16-bit era and down will work fine, but I've not tested them all yet.

vpie

@pitcrawler How did you got Retropie running in the first place? I've been troubleshooting issues for hours now and still can't make it work on the Rock64.

Which base image did you use? The minimal ubuntu (bionic?), debian (jessie or stretch)? The desktop version? Or maybe armbian or diet pi? Did you install any particular packages to make it work with that script?
I'd appreciatte a lot if you could share the efforts you mentioned!
Thanks!

pitcrawler

@vpie
the site I linked in the previous post goes to a Github page with changes to 4 files shown. I re-made the changes to the files in the Retropie-Setup folder but changed every mention of "Rock64" to "Rockpro64". This was on the 64 bit minimal bionic image.

Now the rest of it I don't exactly remember off the top of my head, but I had to do some screwing around with the sdl2 package. Either I removed the libsdl2-dev dependency from retroarch.sh or I installed libsdl2-dev first and also removed the dependency. It was pretty much trial and error but I did eventually get it working. Not all the emulators worked though.

There'a a version of Recalbox available for the Rockpro64 now so that's what I'm currently using.