Questions about upcoming RetroPie (Bullseye).

windg

Hello.
A new version of Pi OS was released a few days ago, this means that a new version of RetroPie will be released sometime in the future.I want to ask some questons :

What improvements will bring the use of KMS?
The new version will offer the option to install Pixel Desktop and Kodi.?

Thanks.

mitu

What improvements will bring the use of KMS?

For the Pi4, a solution to screen tearing experienced by some users. For the older platforms, support for OpenGL (in addition to OpenGL ES), though I'm not sure if the general performance on Pi3 and later will be impacted.

On the downside, some functionality is impacted by the new KMS driver usage - splashscreen won't work as it is, omxplayer is no longer supported so won't be used in EmulationStation or other setups that might have used it, emulators that used the old Broadcom GLES drivers will no longer work, some DPI/DSI screens may not work right away without updated support from the vendor, some config.txt options will go away (rotation support for one), tvservice is totally unsupported (that will impact resolution switching used by some CRT dedicated setups) and probably more that I haven't yet tested or seen (e.g. steamlink).

The biggest downside of using the KMS driver - as far as RetroPie is impacted - is the fact that for older models (Pi 0/1), the new KMS driver will make it impossible to use the old emulators that were available just for those platforms and were optimized to use the old drivers (i.e. pcsx_rearmed, mame4all, pisnes, older advmame).
The dispmanx driver for RetroArch will also be unavailable, but I don't think it is widely used right now.

The new version will offer the option to install Pixel Desktop and Kodi.?

For the desktop, I don't think will be any changes, you'd still be able to install it as it is now.
Kodi is not yet available for Raspi OS Bullseye as a package, but there's an effort to package it and include it in the official repositories.

windg

Thanks for the detailed answers!

sirhenrythe5th

sick, sounds to a pure player (=non techi) like this:

Advantages: 1 (tearing)
Disadvantages: several

Feels more like a downgrade imo :D

mitu

@sirhenrythe5th said in Questions about upcoming RetroPie (Bullseye).:

Disadvantages: several

I've listed them mainly from the point of view of how things are implemented right now in RetroPie, that doesn't mean the existing functionality cannot be implemented otherwise - will just need a different path or changes to existing modules.

EDIT: not related to RetroPie, but the new release making use of the open source GPU/VPU stack going forward is an important step.

dankcushions

I think long term, it's much better for Raspberry Pis to have a) an open source graphics stack, and b) a more 'standard' solution. as an educational tool it seems silly for the pi having bespoke APIs, and it meant that (as above) several pieces of software ended up being tied to that bespoke ecosystem out of convenience/necessity.