Failed RetroPie Experiments

[SuperFromND]

[small disclaimer: I'm not disrespecting any of the emulator developers, nor the RetroPie developers, for these experiments failing. This is purely just me messing around and seeing if certain ideas work or not.]

This post documents some cores/ports/emulators that I've attempted to compile and run on the Raspberry Pi for possible inclusion with RetroPie, but failed in one way or another. All of these were attempted on RetroPie 4.4, default image, Raspberry Pi 3B, no overclocking.

Sega Naomi support in Reicast

This one's pretty straight-forward. Reicast has a flag to enable support for the Sega Naomi arcade boards, which used similar hardware to the Dreamcast. Enabling it with the scriptmodule is as simple as changing the make command to make NAOMI=1 and building from source.

Unfortunately, after placing the required BIOS file in the data folder, trying to run Monkey Ball in this build causes VRAM errors. Perhaps this might work on a board with more RAM (an oDroid perhaps?), but I don't own one to test with.

It should be noted that on x86 builds, lr-reicast does support the Sega Naomi out of the box.
Addendum 4/15/2019: lr-reicast is now available on Pi builds under the experimental section, meaning Naomi games can now be played on the Pi!

Palm OS Libretro Core

After getting J2ME games running on the Pi, a natural progression would be to try Palm OS. The only active emulator I was able to find was Mu, which in theory would compile just fine since it's a RetroArch core. Unfortunately, attempting to compile will throw errors involving undeclared ROM filesizes.

The Powder Game Libretro Core

This one actually did compile correctly, but unfortunately it runs far too slowly to be considered anything but experimental. (Performance is roughly on par with lr-yabause)

MiniVmac Libretro Core

Now as a core, MiniVmac works perfectly fine when you compile it. However, the problem is that, in order for the core to boot into anything, you need to place MacIIX.ROM into ~/RetroPie-Setup/tmp/build/libretro-minivmac/linux before compiling, which is completely different to any other core that requires a BIOS file, and would make it impossible to supply binaries since they would contain Apple's BIOS code.

ScummVM Libretro Core

Yes, this apparently exists! Unfortunately, I couldn't get it to boot directly into a game, (only booting to the ScummVM menu, and even then it required modifying the Start ScummVM.sh file; though it can run games if you add them via the ScummVM menu) plus it doesn't offer any obvious benefit over just using ScummVM. Not to mention that it takes ages to compile from source.

Addendum: Turns out that there's an entire thread dedicated to this core, and they've solved the problems that I've had. This core is currently being PR'd to RetroPie, as of 12/6/2018.