Latest Gamecube Developments on Pi4

pi4papiba

So, i created an account to share that i've been running lots of tests throughout the months and closely following GC progress on the Pi.
So, lets go:
A few tips to run dolphin with best possible speed:
composition turned off
low resolution on X
CPU overide in not cool. turn it off, it break games.

Opengl have some problems related to drivers that make double dash and RE4 have a blue filter over the screen.
This is seen also in android and other plataforms and chips that doesnt have driver support to some features regarding 3.3 OGL.
If the game has a pal version, use that. Since it runs in 50 over 60 and 25 over 30, it may be a difference from unplayable to playable.
I've managed to get full speed 50fps MKDD running my screen in 640x480.
Resident Evil remake is perfect playable. 30fps stable.
Most of games run 2/3 of speed in gles.

Now the best part of it all:
Vulkan support. Usually i compile the vulkan drivers once a month and run some tests to see if dolphin runs. For a few months it crashed but...
It started to run 2 months ago but with a far share of troubles regarding memory alloc, it causes glitches all over the screen but the games runs now. I tried a lot of games and all managed to run better than OGL regarding to performance and even that blue tint in MKDD and RE4 now is gone.
But the graphic glitches on the screen makes it unplayable for now, but you can see that the overhead that vulkan provides regarding to cpu power makes the games have better framerates even in state. I think we can be positive for great things coming in the next months.

I'll probably compile it again next week and see how it goes again.

George Spiggott

@pi4papiba some great tips there. I'm glad to see others are testing this out. I'm not experiencing the problems you have had with CPU override also what is the 'composition' option? Is it set to off by default? I tried a few more games off the mid-low spec list, Wario World and Super Monkey Ball 2, both run a bit too slowly to play an SMB2 has lots of graphical errors.

I can confirm @pi4papiba's report that Resident Evil 1 remake plays well. In addition I discovered that anything that does run well enough to play will do so with FXAA or MSAA x2 on. Much like with PPSSPP and Mupen64.P.N. there is very little additional overhead when this is used.

pi4papiba

@george-spiggott Hey! You are not alone. There are lots of people out there that really wants to see the pi shines even more with gamecube support.

I'm not experiencing the problems you have had with CPU override

In my experience it only improves variable framerate games (e.g. Spyro or The Last Story. For normal games it messes with game logic/speed and sound/music runs super strange. Its not like a frameskip in PPSSPP that is totally usable.
But if you dont notice, thats great. Keep it that way!

what is the 'composition' option? Is it set to off by default?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg#Composite
Basically its a program that runs on X window managers that is responsable to draw effects into the screen. Like vsync, shadows, blur, transparency, etc. Pretty much every desktop in linux uses one and it hurts performance a lot. Since dolphin is running under X, it benefits a lot from disabling it.
Just search on how to disable composition + your DE/WM and make sure your are not running it.

George Spiggott

@pi4papiba I still have not found the composite feature but I will keep looking. I did find that reducing the screen resolution to 1280x720 vastly improved the frame rate. Both Worms 3D and Soul Calibur 2 run at 30+ FPS this way (likely others also when I try them). I would say SC2 is fully playable like this. Unfortunately part of the screen is cut off in this screen mode making menus in Dolphin difficult to navigate, hopefully I can resolve this.

pi4papiba

@george-spiggott What OS and DE are you using? 32 or 64bit? MESA version?

George Spiggott

@pi4papiba I'm using the Monkabuntu 2.0 64bit Ubuntu build. My MESA is 19.3.2.1

This isn't my primary build for my Pi, My official Pi 4 Retropie image is so my MESA is the current (updated a few weeks ago) stable build that Retropie-update installs. I did consider trying downloading a more cutting edge version but I want to keep my Retropie build stable without having to modify the firmware back.

When things are more stable I may try an installation of Dolphin over Raspberry Pi OS. This build has several emulators installed but performance on N64 and PSP seems to be much worse than on my official build so I have not bothered with them.

Out of interest have you been able to successfully connect a real Wiimote on your build? I can connect it but the emulator disables it when the game starts. If I could connect my Wiimote then I could probably give Wii games a more thorough testing. Now I've got some Gamecube games to run at 30FPS I think some Wii game may be viable.

Zering

@george-spiggott Has anybody tested Paper Mario? I'm curious how performance is for that game.

George Spiggott

@zering I haven't. I've shelved this and gone back to my standard Retropie configuration. I'll go back to it when something new happens.

Zering

@george-spiggott Oh right, well thanks anyway. I was curious about this game as I was planning on playing through the Mario RPGs. Regardless your findings are very encouraging.

George Spiggott

Anyone tried Alien Hominid? I heard it plays well on low end machines. I'll test it myself when I rebuild my 64bit build but it may be a while.

gandalth23

I am testing Mario Kart Double Dash with on RPi4 64 Bit and run into the following problems:

Graphics works fine when I choose player and kart.
When gameplay starts, I do not see the kart and track. Everything seems to completely dark, except for the overlays which show e.g. the name of race track or current race position.

Here is my setup:

RPi OS 64 Bit with kms enabled.
Dolphin 5.0-14017 compiled from source.
Mesa 21 including Vulkan compiled from source.
I do not have any serious overclocking applied (cpu_freq=1750, gpu_freq=600)

In Dolphin's graphics config, I choose OpenGL or Vulkan V3D 4.2. No matter what, the result described above stays the same.
Does anyone encounter similar results? Any hints?

Best,
gandalth

George Spiggott

@gandalth23 Yes I encountered the same symptoms on both my Pi Dolphin builds. No idea what the cause is.

gandalth23

George, thanks for sharing!

Meanwhile I tested the same setting on 64-bit Intel Debian Buster and it works perfectly on that setup. I wonder if it's a bug in Dolphin.
As I'm new here: does anybody if there are any Dolphin developers following this forum?

Best,
gandalth

shavecat

Hey ,
So i can install doplihn on my retropie pi 4 ?
HOW plz ? :))

gandalth23

You need to run a 64 Bit OS on the RPI4, e.g. this one:
https://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspios_arm64/images/raspios_arm64-2021-04-09/

On this operating system, you can pull the sources of Dolphin, and compile it. The sources and building instructions are here:
https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin

This does require some work. If somebody is aware of an easier way, please chime in.

gandalth23

@George-Spiggott
Head over to this thread for updates on Mario Kart Double Dash:

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/30541/dolphin-elumator-running-on-rp4b-64bit