Pi3A+, n64, and 256MB RAM is not enough

[ericbsmith42]

So I was having a problem with getting n64 games to run on the Pi3A+. The games would run as fine as can be expected if they would start, but they often times wouldn't start at all. Even games that I had already played would utterly fail to launch three times out of four.

I finally had an idea when looking at the Bash display in the command line and suddenly realized that there were only 256MB of RAM available out of the 512MB that the Pi3A+ has. Looking over /boot/config.txt I noticed three lines all the way at the bottom which set video RAM split, apparently basing the split on how much RAM the system has.

gpu_mem_256=128
gpu_mem_512=256
gpu_mem_1024=256

The middle one applies to the Pi3A+, as it has 512MB of RAM, and sets the split at 256MB vRAM and 256MB system RAM. This setup means that the Pi3A+ has effectively 1/3 of the available system RAM that the Pi3B or Pi3B+ have, and that appears to not be enough for n64 games. I tried changing the setting to gpu_mem_512=128 but that resulted in some front end instability (probably doesn't help that I'm using the 'Showcase' theme, which is a bit of a vram hog, it might work on a less intensive theme). However, setting it to gpu_mem_512=192 seems to allow for system stability as well as allows every n64 game I've tried so far to load (getting them to run stable is another matter, but at least the games LOAD).

For the technical details, quit Emulation Station by pressing:
Start -> Quit -> Quit EmulationStation

At the command line type:
sudo nano /boot/config.txt

look for the following line near the bottom of config.txt:
gpu_mem_512=256

and change it to:
gpu_mem_512=192

Press ctrl+O (letter O) to Write Out/Save the change. Then type ctrl+x to exit and type sudo reboot to restart the pi.