Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn

sergioad

barbudreadmon

@sergioad said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

@barbudreadmon I will check it out

i'm never too sure what people like about those training/practice mode, but if it's only about having infinite everything to go all out, i know pretty much any fighting game has cheats to allow that, using cheats might be less convenient than having a practice mode though, idk.

sergioad

@barbudreadmon it is not only having everything, but having an inmobile punching bag and being able to swap characters on the fly

h2805270

Here's an appropriate challenge (skip to 37:45)

SEGA Rally Championship was one of the bottleneck titles of the system. If you can get it to run on a Pi, you can automatically run anything.

I think the issue is that nobody made any special Dynamic Re-compilers for any of the Emulators. Saturn Emulation has always been heavily CPU reliant.

barbudreadmon

@h2805270 said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

I think the issue is that nobody made any special Dynamic Re-compilers for any of the Emulators

You are wrong though.

This video is the perfect illustration of how bad sega saturn emulation is on pi4 despite the fps counter sometimes being close to 60, it's crazy how high the auto-frameskipping gets, i'm wondering how many frames it actually shows out of those nearly 60, feels more like using microsoft powerpoint at this point, it's almost hilarious in street fighter alpha 2 (one of the saturn 2D games reported as "being perfectly playable" on pi4 ?) when the flickering fireballs sometimes won't even be visible due to all the visibility frames being skipped.

dankcushions

@h2805270 said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

I think the issue is that nobody made any special Dynamic Re-compilers for any of the Emulators. Saturn Emulation has always been heavily CPU reliant.

yabause has had an sh2 dynarec forever.

barbudreadmon

@dankcushions said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

yabause has had an sh2 dynarec forever.

Yeah, furthermore the bottleneck for saturn emulation has always clearly been the rendering part with its 2 VDPs. Pi4's GPU is just way too lacking to handle that...

Zering

@barbudreadmon So, being realistic, we can't expect Saturn emulation to improve until the next generation of Pi computers?

barbudreadmon

@zering I suspect a big part of the problem to be in pi's GPU drivers, but yeah having a superior GPU (assuming pi5 will have that) would certainly help. Otherwise you could also consider buying a better SoC, like the odroid n2 which was available long before the pi4.

DreamcastKid

@barbudreadmon said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

it's almost hilarious in street fighter alpha 2 (one of the saturn 2D games reported as "being perfectly playable" on pi4 ?) when the flickering fireballs sometimes won't even be visible due to all the visibility frames being skipped.

Perfectly playable on my RPi4 .. no frame skipping on or flickering fireballs

DreamcastKid

@barbudreadmon said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

All of this to say : "Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter" and "Night Warriors" are perfect examples of games you should never even think of playing on yabasanshiro.

Have only test Night Warriors ... runs pretty good using lr-yabause with no frame skipping on :)

barbudreadmon

@dreamcastkid said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

no frame skipping on or flickering fireballs

One of those statements is false.
Just to be clear, the fireballs must flicker, they do in all 2D street fighters afaik, flickering was an effect used to fake transparency before 3D systems, it is about showing an element for 1 frame then not showing it in the next one, and repeat.
If your fireballs don't flicker, then that means the frames when the fireball is invisible are skipped, and you have frameskip on.

acidtech

@barbudreadmon Sorry, but that video was horrible. I compiled a version of Yabause/Sanshiro last year/early this year and played Sega Rally significantly better than that and that was just a goof to see what was could be done.

see link below.

So don't get too down based on that video.

Found the old thread: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/24568/is-yabasanshiro-emulator-coming-on-retropie/268?_=1613102464587

Follow the instructions there(you will have to piece them together somewhat but its not that hard) and you should be able to build a standalone yabause/yaba sanshiro that plays sega rally decently. Not completely without frame skip but way better than that video shows.

barbudreadmon

@acidtech said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

I compiled a version of Yabause/Sanshiro last year/early this year and played Sega Rally significantly better than that and that was just a goof to see what was could be done.

I know the situation, actually i was the one who recommended to use standalone and to forget about the libretro core i wrote.
With standalone version it will be significantly faster :

because you won't have to go through the libretro api for gl rendering, the most significant overhead you'll get with a libretro core over its standalone version is when opengl/gles is involved
because standalone version of yabasanshiro is offloading part of the rendering to a subthread, which is something impossible to do with the libretro api

Zering

@barbudreadmon How do you go about installing the standalone core on the pi 4?

barbudreadmon

@zering clone the pi4 branch with git clone https://github.com/devmiyax/yabause.git -b pi4 then follow the steps at https://github.com/devmiyax/yabause/tree/pi4/yabause/src/retro_arena#retropie-on-raspberry-pi-4 to build it ?

Zering

@barbudreadmon Thanks. I've successfully cloned the branch but when I try the first cmake command I get a bash command not found error. Is it possible there's an error in the syntax?

barbudreadmon

@zering i think that command line expects you to run https://github.com/devmiyax/yabause/tree/pi4/yabause/src/retro_arena#get-source-code first

Zering

@barbudreadmon Thanks, I got it working. Very impressed with the results. Finally I can play Panzer Dragoon Saga again!

G30FF

I followed the instructions to install standalone yabasanshiro for my Pi 4, and it's up and running. I tried a couple of games, and they work great! However I'm having one minor issue I'm hoping for help with. It says in the README that select is hard mapped to Show/Hide Menu, but even after mapping select manually through keymapv2.json in ~/.yabasanshiro, it's not recognizing select on my controller. I can only open the menu with Esc on a keyboard. Also, I need to use a mouse to navigate or interact with the Yabasanshiro menu. Is it possible to do this with just a controller? Sorry if this is a dumb question or one that has already been answered.