Raspberry pi 4 emulator limitations.

tman69

With the RP4 having much better specs than the previous models, I was wondering, in the professional/unprofessional opinion of more tech savvy people, if it might be possible to utilize a PS2 emulator. I’m seeing unofficial Retropie copies for sale on Amazon that claim it 99% works on the raspberry Pi 4, and I trust that people just found a works-just-enough workaround before the official release, but even they state that some of the 3D arcade games and N64 games run slow due to system limitations.

I think it’s possible that the stated issues could be resolved in the official release, but what are the thoughts on the possibile/likely capabilities of RPi4 concerning all this?

herb_fargus

@tman69 said in Raspberry pi 4 emulator limitations.:

. I’m seeing unofficial Retropie copies for sale on Amazon that claim it 99% works

Of course they do, and people who are dumb enough to believe their outrageous claims are unfortunately dumb enough to also pay these scumbags for retropie.

We won't really know the limitations until the software is updated, cores are optimised, etc. In theory you can play GameCube games with a lot of concessions, overclock, slow frame rate, but I personally won't hold my breath for playable GameCube. I'll be happy with a slightly improved n64 performance.

VictimRLSH

I'm amazed at what my Pi 4 can do already without any optimizations. It is easily outperforming the 3B+ by 4-5x. Claims that it has the power of a desktop computer circa 2012 seem to be accurate. Web games that were slow or impossible to play on Chromium on the 3B run easily at full speed on the 4gb Pi 4.

That being said, I run PCSX2 on my Windows laptop and it requires HUGE horsepower to run most games full speed. I doubt the Pi 4 will run PS2 games particularly well, but I think that it could at least get them to run.

George Spiggott

Play! Is available on Retroarch for Android. If you have a suitable device with similar capabilities to the Pi4 you should have a good idea how fast PS2 emulation on the Pi4 will be.

The only comparison I can do is on my Samsung A6 phone. It's less powerful than the Pi4 and it's like watching a PS2 played in super slow motion (single figure FPS).

There are videos doing the rounds for Gamecube emulated on the Pi4.

VictimRLSH

@George-Spiggott Tried that on Galaxy S9+ and it still doesn't do very well at all.

George Spiggott

Here's Play! on a Samsung S10+. The S10+ has (amongst its eight cores) two 2.3GHz A75 cores that are similar (but more powerful than the Pi4's A72 cores) and certainly a more powerful GPU that has full driver support.

Getting Play! to work on the Pi4 seems like it would be possible at some point. Finding games that will run at a reasonable speed will be something else again. I have PCSX2 on my old desktop (AMD A8 with a STR rating of 1000 or so) and some games run at a reasonable speed even though PCSX2 requires processors with a STR rating of 1600-2000+.

I realise Play! isn't the same as PCSX2 and AMD processors are not the same as ARM processors and so on so I'm almost certainly comparing apples and oranges here.

VictimRLSH

That is acceptable, and much faster than the S9+. I tried running Dark Cloud 1 and got about 2 fps. LOL

George Spiggott

Play! is very slow at the moment compared to PCSX2. For comparison I tried SoulCalibur 2 on both standalone emulators on my PC. PCSX2 gives me 45-60FPS (a very playable speed) while Play! gives me 15FPS (with lots of graphical glitches) for the same sections of the same game.

I assume that Play! on an Arm processor is at roughly the same stage of development.

Does anyone know how to find the STR ratings of Arm processors, is that rating even useful?

Many popular PS2 games were released on the PSP and the Gamecube/Wii. I think both of these systems will be playable on the Pi before PS2. PSP versions of games currently play well at double resolution on the unofficial Retropie Pi4 images, they look very similar to their PS2 counterparts.

matchaman

Should we expect good performance on Kronos/YabaSanshiro? Running VF1 and VF2 decently would completely replace the need for a PC in my main cabinet!

dankcushions

@matchaman kronos is built for current desktop GPUs so the pi4 can't support it - it won't reach the Open GL 3.3 minimum requirement.

yaba-sanshiro sounds promising as it has a GLES/ARM focus. i would expect good performance, but we have yet to create an installer script for it.

George Spiggott

It occurs to be that by the time that Pi can run PS2 it could probably also run WiiU (if suitable emulation software became available). The Desktop emulators for PS2 and WiiU have similar requirements.

Are there any technical limitations preventing Play! from being installed on a Pi4 apart from the current GPU driver and speed the emulator would run at?

dankcushions

@George-Spiggott said in Raspberry pi 4 emulator limitations.:

It occurs to be that by the time that Pi can run PS2 it could probably also run WiiU (if suitable emulation software became available). The Desktop emulators for PS2 and WiiU have similar requirements.

i think WiiU is a bit of stretch, but you can run GC/Wii (albeit not via retropie)

Are there any technical limitations preventing Play! from being installed on a Pi4 apart from the current GPU driver and speed the emulator would run at?

i don't think so. it probably requires aarch64 for which an experimental raspbian kernel exists. apparently it's GLES3. sounds like it could work

mitu

@dankcushions said in Raspberry pi 4 emulator limitations.:

i don't think so. it probably requires aarch64 for which an experimental raspbian kernel exists

Yes, but the userland it's still 32bit, so I doubt it would work on Raspbian alone (even booted in 64bit mode). More likely using Sakaki's 64 bit Gentoo image - https://github.com/sakaki-/gentoo-on-rpi-64bit.

Triquick

What I've always wondered is if the Retropie on Raspberrypie4 could run some of the Wii U Shop games, mainly stuff like the Rebirth series (Castlevania, Contra, Blaster Master) and the 8bit Megaman games.