Naomi2 support on lr-flycast

pjft

Just caught wind of this on the official libretro Twitter account. Unsure how it'll perform on the pi, but thought some would find it interesting.

https://twitter.com/libretro/status/1515557286374223884?s=21&t=uvm1VmGaKD3JC6Andq32hw

https://imgur.com/a/NyoOpPw

~~It's probably available by installing from source.~~

Edit: you'd need to compile the code from the upstream repository, as we're not using it yet, so installing from source won't be enough.

barbudreadmon

@pjft said in Naomi2 support on lr-flycast:

you'd need to compile the code from the upstream repository, as we're not using it yet, so installing from source won't be enough.

It would be nice if a standalone flycast build was also included in retropie, currently some retropie users think redream is faster than flycast while the only reason for this statement is that they are comparing a standalone emulator to a libretro core, which is known for adding tons of overhead when it comes to gl(es) rendering (see ppsspp, yabasanshiro, ...). The fact standalone flycast performs faster than redream on pi4 was already confirmed by some retropie users who gave it a test.

mitu

@barbudreadmon said in Naomi2 support on lr-flycast:

It would be nice if a standalone flycast build was also included in retropie

that's currently on my todo list - to replace reicast (the standalone emulator) with Flycast. Seems to work better on Pi3/Pi4 (and probably other ARM platforms) than the libretro core.

barbudreadmon

@mitu i believe @Darksavior has a wip script for this, and yeah you'd better avoid using the libretro core versions of gl(es) emulators on low-end devices, iirc it has to do with how retroarch has to save and restore gl context at every frame (note that vulkan shouldn't have this major drawback), it's not an issue if your gpu has power to spare but a pi doesn't have that kind of leeway.

Another misunderstanding about the performance difference between redream and flycast are the 30 fps games, both emulators are actually rendering 30 different frames per second and duping frames accordingly so that the content can match your screen's refresh rate (or at the very least i assume that's what redream is doing too since those additional 30 frames don't really exist), the only difference is that redream is reporting the displayed framerate (~60 fps) while flycast is reporting the emulated framerate (~30 fps). FWIW, here is a list of 60 fps games on dreamcast, any game not on that list is supposed to be 30 fps and it's perfectly normal for flycast to report it as such, it's not a performance issue.

DTEAM

@barbudreadmon said in Naomi2 support on lr-flycast:

@Darksavior has a wip script for this

Where can I get it? I don't see that on GitHub. I'll test Naomi2.

Darksavior

@DTEAM @barbudreadmon It's cmitu's wip script. It won't directly load games right now. You'll have to do it from inside flycast. Ymmv.. I was using mesa version 21.3.8 https://github.com/cmitu/RetroPie-Setup/tree/flycast-standalone

Side note..after installing the latest mesa the pi4 can handle (21.3.8) on 64bit Bullseye lite and compiled retroarch and lr-flycast with vulkan, I don't get any more major frame drops in sonic adventure 2's first level. It still hovers at around 59fps and I have no idea what further compiling optimizations can be done.