Getting the best N64 experience on a Pi 4

sergioad

How do you think N64 could run over LR + Vulkan?

akatoosh

Apologies if this has already been discussed but...

I've been trying out the settings roslof put in his spreadsheet for various games, but I've resolved to using GlideN64 in place of the hires variant because none of the games I've tried have run very well. DK64 for instance is stutter city with GlideN64-hires but works perfectly in base Glide. I was just wondering if there were any specific settings you guys were using to make it run properly?

My pi is overclocked per roslof's recommendations as well. Running the latest versions of everything, that I can see.

roslof

@akatoosh are you sure you're using NTSC ROMs? Or PAL?

akatoosh

@roslof I'm using NTSC roms

roslof

@akatoosh said in Getting the best N64 experience on a Pi 4:

@roslof I'm using NTSC roms

Okay, it (your example of DK64) runs very well for me with hires, so here are my relevant settings:
https://pastebin.com/eL6dZhHv

Also note in my compatibility list how to create an entry to handle the follow-cam issue).

Hope this helps!

akatoosh

@roslof Thanks! Oddly everything seems to match up. Maybe I’ll try a different rom. Did you set the resolution to 640x480 in the runcommand menu?

roslof

@akatoosh no, I just leave it at default.
Reminds me... Might you be running in 4K? Or did you update config.txt to lock 1080P?

akatoosh

@roslof yeah, I did change it to 1080p, so I guess resolution isn’t the issue.

akatoosh

@roslof I’m also seeing that while playing Mario Party 3 the tiles and character models are missing in-game. Not sure if this is a me thing or what, but I’m following the emulator recommendation and settings from the spreadsheet. Maybe something to do with the FB setting?

roslof

@akatoosh said in Getting the best N64 experience on a Pi 4:

@roslof I’m also seeing that while playing Mario Party 3 the tiles and character models are missing in-game. Not sure if this is a me thing or what, but I’m following the emulator recommendation and settings from the spreadsheet. Maybe something to do with the FB setting?

No, it's not just you. You're correct about the issue with Next, but it's not due to the FrameBuffer. You could use lr-mupen64plus instead of next. The characters will render and tiles will be correctly placed.. Even with Framebuffer False. Will update the compatibility chart to reflect this. Cheers!

akatoosh

@roslof Cool. The same issue is happening in Mario Party 2 as well, though in the plus emulator the HUD flickers for me a little bit.

retropieuser555

https://github.com/libretro/parallel-n64/issues/646 - came across this issue when looking around recently, it seems for whatever reason using vulkan fixes the red dot/camera issue Pokémon snap we're stuck with. So if nothing else when vulkan is stable enough to be integrated into retropie we might see that game become playable?

roslof

@akatoosh said in Getting the best N64 experience on a Pi 4:

@roslof Cool. The same issue is happening in Mario Party 2 as well, though in the plus emulator the HUD flickers for me a little bit.

Helpful. I made this change as well. I didn't notice the HUD flicker. Would you help me understand where/when the HUD is doing this?

akatoosh

@roslof hmm. Strange. I see it during a game once players start moving on the board. As a player rolls and walks on the board the 4 character panels in the corners will flicker.

akatoosh

@akatoosh the flickering doesn’t happen constantly. Occasionally it will start and stop.

retropieuser555

Hey has anyone got any issues with ISS 64? I find with the game there's these big ugly shadows underneath the players. (https://github.com/gonetz/GLideN64/issues/103) tried changing the depthcompare to true but it didn't fix it. Any ideas?

quicksilver

@retropieuser555 iirc depth compare doesn't work on the raspberry pi. Don't take that as gospel but that is likely the issue.

quicksilver

@george-spiggott A bit of a late response here but I just noticed this as well. I just started messing with my pi again after about 6 months or so. It seems standalone mupen64plus-gliden64 also got a nice performance boost. Several games that were very choppy now run much better. The vigilante games, Fighting Force and SOTE all seem to run much better now. Im still testing but I am sure there are more.

Edit: Can add "destruction derby" to the list of games with improved performance. This another one that was a choppy mess but seems full speed now.

dankcushions

@quicksilver great! maybe it was this? i didn't see any improvements in games but i barely benchmarked it other than what i wrote in the PR

quicksilver

@dankcushions Perhaps so! Is there a good method for benchmarking? Id like to get around to doing that in an effort to see what overclocking the pi 4 actually does to improve performance and by how much.

EDIT: so after some additional testing I have found that the vast majority of the n64 library is playable on a raspberry pi 4 with good performance and accuracy now. This is really exciting!

Something interesting I have noticed is that some of the games that still perform poorly, only do so for the first minute or two of the game and then they become full speed or nearly so for the rest of the play session. A couple examples are killer instinct, quake 2, and excite bike. All three games (there may be more) are initially very slow and choppy. During this time you can see that memory usage on the pi is steadily climbing. After the game finishes loading whatever it is into the RAM the game smooths out and works well. I wonder if this is something that could be optimized to work better on the pi?