Metal Gear Solid - Framerate slowdown

Katzenfutter

Hi!
I've setup my Raspberry PI 4 (4GB) with the offical 4.6 Retropie Image.

The PSX Game "Metal Gear Solid" don't work correctly on my Pi.
I get heavy slowdowns when there are enemy's on the screen. The game runs even slower, when 2 enemy's are chasing me and the alarm is triggered.
I'm using the offical AC-Adapter from raspberry and tried different PSX BIOS-versions.
The SD-Card is a Class 10 SanDisk Extreme Pro, so that shouldn't be a problem. I tried both options: playing from SD-Card and playing from an USB 3.1 Stick, doesn't make a difference.
The Rom is also not faulty, i can reproduce the slowdowns on the PAL or NTSC Version of the game.
Other PSX Games run better on my Pi, so I don't think it is damaged?

The Pi isn't overclocked, and right now without any case. (in a few days I get a FLIRC)

Is there something else i can do, to make the Game run like it should run?
Maybe someone can test the Game on his Pi4?

pjft

@Katzenfutter Can you try to disable vibration on the RetroArch settings menu and see if it helps?

Katzenfutter

Thank you for your reply!
Unfortunately that didn't help :(

pjft

Then more information can help. Verbose log of runcommand.log, retroarch.cfg files for PSX and all, etc.

Can you actually confirm with the framerate counter on screen that the frames are dropping? It might just be that the game was slowing down then in real hardware.

jasonh1314

@Katzenfutter One thing I tried that worked really well for me on the Pi 3B+ that might help on the Pi4 would be to start Metal Gear Solid and then at any point after it gets going press what would be the equivalent to Select + Y (Xbox controller), Select/Options + Triangle (PlayStation Controller), or Select + X (SNES Style Controller) to pull up the Retroarch menu.

Go to "Quick Menu"
Go to "Options"
Enable "Enhanced Resolution"
Enable "Enhanced Resolution Speed Hack"
Back out of the menus and "Save Current Configuration"

This might help or might not. But This is what I have enabled on mine and I haven't noticed any slowdown at all. For a visual look at this, ETA Prime has a video on this that may be worth checking out:

Hope this helps!

Katzenfutter

@pjft : what do you mean with the runcommand.log files? I only changed bilinear-filtering to "on" and audio from "simple" to "gaussian" in the Retroarch options.
The enhanced resolution didn't change the stuttering.

At 5:10 you see the performance issue's I'm having (audio is ok on my pi)
Thank you all for your help! :-)

pjft

@Katzenfutter Removing bilinear filtering and re-setting the audio to simple might get things started, at least to troubleshoot it.

The run-command log file is in /dev/shm/runcommand.log - do send it over when you run it with verbose logging. The RetroArch config files - in the All folder and the PSX folder - might also help here.

That being said, I found this that might suggest you're not alone, from back in the day:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7767/pi3-problem-running-metal-gear-solid-psx

So it might just really be an emulator problem for that game.

Thanks.

pjft

@Katzenfutter To be fair, I just played that first scene a few times on my end and no significant slowdown on the Pi3 nor the Pi4. I am convinced at this stage that i might either be an options thing (do send them over) or just your memory tricking us in that that same slowdown probably occurred on the real hardware.