Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo

barbudreadmon

@GreenHawk84 the weirdest thing is that there was no change to cps3 emulation over the last 7 months, and several people confirmed it was running fine on pi3b+ at the time. Did you try the temp_soft_limit = 70 trick ? If it shows even the slightliest improvement, it definitely means your pi is too hot (which seems normal to me if you are only using heatsinks, pi3b+ has heat issues, pi4 has worse heat issues, latest pis are a disappointment imho, i recommend buying an odroid N2 next : it's a powerhouse compared to the pi4, it has no heat issues, and it's not that much pricier when you factor in the cost of active cooling, power supply and micro-hdmi cable to the pi4).

GreenHawk84

@barbudreadmon yes but I confirmed consistent 55C temps playing SF3 on fbneo. The game is choppy sounding and slowing down right out of the gate.

GreenHawk84

@Lyle_JP said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

I'll be rebuilding with a 4.4 image soon which I will then upgrade to 4.5 without touching FBNeo.

Please report your results with SF3 when you get your fresh install running.

Darksavior

I wish I had an older backup of fbneo. The one I provided from 7/3 doesn't change a thing. I'm not getting the same slowdowns as everyone else. Sf3-2i and sf33s run mostly at 60fps with minor dips which is the same performance that has been for many months. The major slowdowns with 2i is in widescreen. Source doesn't change a thing or temp limit setting. I even set the governor to performance.

barbudreadmon

@Darksavior said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

The one I provided from 7/3 doesn't change a thing

Yeah, as i said, there was no change to the cps3 driver in the past 7 months. I still don't understand why i have none of those issues, it's really weird. Maybe try monitoring cpu freq while playing to make sure there is no throttling ?

Darksavior

@barbudreadmon When did it change? I dug up an fba from a back up from Nov 2018. Pi3b+ stock speeds. Fresh 4.5.1 no updates. SF3-2i WS: Depends on the stage. Alex stage FB-Neo (latest I think) 54-55fps. 57-58fps with FB Alpha v0.2.97.44 63bf16d.

barbudreadmon

@Darksavior It all started with the rowscroll implementation from 2018-09-28 in https://github.com/libretro/fbalpha/commits/master/src/burn/drv/cps3/cps3run.cpp, there is no way around this though, except if you don't mind having totally broken jojoba emulation (no combo meter for P2, no animation on the P1 combo meter), iirc other games from the driver are using this stuff in a less noticeable way, so i still think using latest fbneo with frameskip is better than using older fbalpha with bugs.

GreenHawk84

Last night I removed fbneo and re-applied from Source. Immediately, I noticed the same issues upon starting SF3. I tried Turtles in Time arcade and it runs at 60fps. I will try other games on fbneo to see what kind of performance I have. So far FBA2012 appears to run SF3 very smoothly.

lostless

@GreenHawk84 cps3 games require more processing power than turtles in time. I think the pi is just on the cusp of perfect performance of running cps3 games. And the more accurate the emulator gets, the pi will be less able to handle those games.

GreenHawk84

I am going to try some experiments using commands found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/amqqpq/is_your_pi_throttling_without_telling_you_this/

Just to ensure I am not losing my mind thinking I have a perfectly normal setup.

Riverstorm

@GreenHawk84 - If it helps troubleshooting here's a small script that outputs the speed in a more user friendly format i.e. 900 MHz with CPU/GPU temps like 65°C. I use it with watch if I suspect throttling by the governor, heat, power, etc.

I open a Putty session on my PC and run watch and whatever the script is named so I can monitor the speed and temp in real time while playing on another monitor/TV. It does require an extra device and connectivity but it's helped me a few times.

#!/bin/bash
cpuSpeed0=$(cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_cur_freq)
cpuSpeed1=$(($cpuSpeed0/1000))

cpuTemp0=$(cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp)
cpuTemp1=$(($cpuTemp0/1000))
cpuTemp2=$(($cpuTemp0/100))
cpuTempM=$(($cpuTemp2 % $cpuTemp1))

gpuTemp0=$(/opt/vc/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp)
gpuTemp0=${gpuTemp0//\'/°}
gpuTemp0=${gpuTemp0//temp=/}

echo
echo CPU Speed: $cpuSpeed1" MHz"
echo
echo CPU Temp: $cpuTemp1"."$cpuTempM"°C"
echo GPU Temp: $gpuTemp0

thestarglider

@lostless said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

@GreenHawk84 im running into the same issue since the update. Sf iii feels like it’s running ok, and most probably will not notice, but it is running slower at about 55-60fps with some minor audio pops and clicks. It’s trying, but the accuracy updates just push the pi a tad over the edge. I switched to fba2012 and it’s running fine on that.

Firstly I'm a little confused by the 'running slower at about 55-60fps' part. Are you using a Pi or something else? Because by default the emulators are set to 60hz vertical refresh rate, meaning you won't get anything more than 60fps, and therefore 55-60fps is a pretty good speed.

Anyway I decided to test SF3 (New Generation, 2nd Impact and 3rd Strike) on my Pi, both before updating FBNeo from source and after.

Pre update, I was getting on average 58fps on all three games.

Post update, my FPS actually increased to a fairly solid 60fps, perhaps dropping every so often to 59.

So if yours is not working, something is interfering with your emulation, but I don't think it's the emulator itself.

GreenHawk84

@thestarglider when I pull up the FPS counter in SF3 I am seeing consistent dips to 58fps (occasionally down to 55fps) causing slight [constant] stutter in the motion. I am also hearing similar audio scratchiness. So far this is only with SF3. I fresh installed Retropie not too long ago on an RPi3B+ without adding anything else. I am totally lost on why my B+ is performing worse than anyone else's.

thestarglider

@GreenHawk84 and again, since the target speed of the Emulation is 60fps, I'm somewhat skeptical that this stutter is purely down to a drop of a couple of frames a second that really no human is going to notice with their eyes. Something else is interfering with your game.

barbudreadmon

@thestarglider said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Post update, my FPS actually increased to a fairly solid 60fps, perhaps dropping every so often to 59.

The game actually run at 59.583393Hz, but with RA's fps counter not being perfect you'll only see an approximation.

Anyway, yeah, the pi3b+ is definitely able to run at full speed the 3 sfiii without OC nor frameskip, including sfiii2 with widescreen (for me), i don't understand what's the issue for @Darksavior @Lyle_JP @GreenHawk84, at this point i think it might be a hardware defect.

IanDaemon

Hello, first of all I don't want to complain. You do great work, but is there something wrong with my setup or has someone else experienced the following?

Food Fight ran fine with FBA previously, but when I upgraded to FBNeo I lost the ability to play Food Fight. I didn't notice earlier because it's not a title I play often, but I was recently going to try to make the controls similar to Robotron 2084 only to find that the game no longer played in "Final Burn" (my arcade default). The title never played in FBA2012, FBNeoGeo, and MAME on the RPi. FBA was the only emulator that worked. Is something corrupt with my ROM? Just curious. Thanks.

barbudreadmon

@IanDaemon said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

when I upgraded to FBNeo I lost the ability to play Food Fight

The game is working fine so i guess you are using a bad romset.

Riverstorm

@IanDaemon - Food Fight (foodf) should be working in mame2003 and mame2003-plus. With mame2003-plus I think markwkidd created a "bootstrap" which basically generates the .nvram file on the fly during game launch or it hangs and looks broken. It's seamless to the user. I don't remember if mame2003 has the bootstrap code but I know you can copy the .nvram file over from m3plus to 2003 and it works fine.

There's several games that need .nvram files or they don't boot correctly so I keep clean copies with the ROMs for new setups. I've never needed to do that for FBNeo though as they have always just worked.

barbudreadmon

@Riverstorm said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

I've never needed to do that for FBNeo though as they have always just worked.

Because on latest mame romsets (the ones FBNeo uses), the nvram is part of the romset for games that need it.

Riverstorm

@barbudreadmon said in Goodbye fbalpha, welcome fbneo:

Because on latest mame romsets (the ones FBNeo uses), the nvram is part of the romset for games that need it.

@barbudreadmon - Thanks for that it makes things a lot easier! :)