Orange Pi 5
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I got my OPi5 delivered from the second AliExpress vendor and have been starting to try convert some software I was making work on the RPi4 (Chiaki).
I'm just starting to read on forums and see what's being used for graphics and video decode.
I have Panfrost Mesa fork with the latest Armbian right now and its working ok. But Panfrost is only about 25-40% performance compared to the blob drivers according to what people report running some common simple seeming gl benchmarking program (glmark2-es2, glmark2-es2-wayland).As I think someone mentioned higher up here there's been some 'drama' involoving the main maker of the panfrost drivers.
I tried to build Dolphin and the build finished but I only got a black screen+crash using OpenGL. (and software. NULL ran) If anyone knows what I need to do pease I'd love to know! :)
There seems to be no Mali Vulkan drivers available at all.
I'm trying to figure out how to get an OS with the 'vendor blob' gpu drivers. I'm not really sure atm what those do and don't.
EDIT:
This is an interesting read with some contributors that sound like they know what they are talking about (stuartiannaylor ),
https://forum.radxa.com/t/ubuntu-20-02-mali-drivers/12373/43 -
As you're all emu people here I'm guessing you have this in your youtube stream already but this is a great video by TakiUdon showing how to play a bunch of steam games on this chipset.
I learned that something called FEX-EMU exists.
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I managed to hack around the code error in Dolphin and got Resident Evil 4 GC running pretty nicely on my Orange Pi 5! :D
It seems more GPU than CPU bound.You can follow where I posted on the Dolphin bug report here,
https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/13198?next_issue_id=13195If you try this out you also have to tell Dolphin to use GLES instead of standard GL,
nano ~/.config/dolphin-emu/GFX.ini
add a line:
PreferGLES = TrueI'm going to play a bit further now and see if it still works! :)
UPDATE: I got to the first village now and FPS are down to 15 (out of 30. I think this game is 30 locked?). Seems to be mainly from all the transparent textures of the big central fire. CPU still looks ok according to htop. If only the graphics drivers were closer to hardware performance limits. :(
Mario Kart Double Dash, ~50fps sometimes a fair bit lower depending on how busy. Crashy sound.
F-Zero GX, Very broken graphics. Completely unplayable.
Mario Sunshine, had a PAL version. In the plaza often at 25fps (full speed) but slows down now and then. Cut scenes pretty distorted. God the controls are annoying! :D
UPDATE2: I think I got slightly better fps in Mario Sunshine and Kart after flicking on some of the optimization options in the gui.
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@RedMarsBlueMoon Back when trying to get Dolphin to work on the Raspberry Pi 4 we managed to get a (very) short list of games that ran well enough to play. Give Worms 3D and Resident Evil remake a try.
Some potentially useful stuff here: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/30174/dolphin-install/6
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For people more interested in having Wi-fi and Bluetooth than the M2 port there is an Orange Pi 5B being launched soon with on board Wi-fi and Bluetooth replacing the M2 port.
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Just got my orange pi 5 4GB. I chose to install ubuntu Jammy desktop from the orange pi site. It had been updated in march 2023 which seems optimistic.
I unzipped the image and used the raspberry pi imager to burn the image to a sd card and it worked perfectly first time :-).
I was really happy with the case / cooler I bought off off aliexpress. Easy to fit and seems to do a good job.
I also purchased a BT / WiFI USB stick. It seems to work out of the box in ubuntu. I have the wifi up and running and I can confirm the BT is at least discoverable. The dongle is nothing special but it was advertised as working with the orangepi which is why I bought it.
I'm installing retropi. This is taking a while as everything need to be compiled (no pre-compiled images). It seems to be working great and should be a pretty good burn in test. After 15min the cooler is barely warm which is a good sign.
I'll update as I learn more. Things I want to test,
- Test retropie/retroarch (particularly PS2, saturn, gamecube etc)
- Connect my PS3 controller via BT.
- See if GL/Vulkan acceleration is supported.
- I may end up swapping to android but I wanted to try ubuntu first.
I'm very curious in other peoples experiences. My goal is a retro arcade box that can support more than the traditional emulators that the pi4 does and at least on paper it looks very promising.
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Here's an updated video showing some more games at somewhat improved performance compared to my previous video.
I'm using the system tweaks I describe here,
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/27022-can-i-overclock-the-gpu-on-my-orange-pi-5/?do=findComment&comment=161522 -
Someone showing Model 3 emulation running quite well with the Supermodel emulator.
I do get some graphics glitching but decent framerates when I tested Sega Rally 2. The guy making the video said I should try an earlier snapshot with previous GL code so I might try that at some point to see if it improves.
UPDATE: Yep I checked out from the commit suggested 4c727ab and its pretty much good visually now, without comparing to actual arcade footage.
Now I can also use the new 3d engine but the frame rate takes a big hit so I'll keep going with their legacy3d mode. -
I had another go setting up my Orange Pi 5. Things went much better this time. I started with a the ultra beta 5 build from Supreme Pi which is a minimal RetroPie installation on top of Armbian (search for the Supreme PI facebook group - the download is free). The good news most of the configuration is done for you and it works more or less out of the box.
The good
- Basic install with RetroPie that works out of the box
- HDMI, sound, and bluetooth worked out of the box
- WiFi worked but was very slow. As it happens I switched to Ethernet anyway.
- Most of the basic emulators work and some the struggled before are much faster (e.g. N64 is rock solid even at higher resolutions and with enhanced graphics).
- Sega Saturn seems to work perfectly at full speed on the handful of games I tested.
- Dolphin works with mixed results depending on the game
- I haven't tried to get PS2 emulation working yet. Looking at videos online it seems like it should be work.
- The orange pi 5 doesn't seem to be taxed at all (and/or the heat sink I bought is very effective). It doesn't get at all hot.
- I think it has video acceleration but I'm not sure.
The bad
- I suspect the Bt/WiFi card I bought is really slow
- Still bleeding edge - very little support
- Upgrading RetroPie somehow broke emulationstation -it was crashing after every game. After lots of frustration I finally uninstalled and re-installed and the problem was gone. Not sure what I broke.
Still to test / work in progress
- Booting from M.2 nvme pcie drive vice sd card
- PS2 emulation
- Dolphin
- validate video acceleration
Very happy with the Orange Pi 5 but I wish there was better support. Things are getting better but there still isn't a lot of documentation out there.
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Switch emulation on Orange Pi 5 using the Skyline emulator.
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Thanks for all of the info in these posts. I am now more curious about the Orange Pi 5 due to some recent action with the RetroPie-Setup script.
I know of some problematic games on Raspberry Pi 4B and am curious if anyone has tried these out yet with an Orange Pi 5:
The House of the Dead 2 (Naomi, lr-flycast): On a Raspberry Pi 4B, there seems to be no combination of settings and core options that gets this one to stay at a consistent 60fps. 45–55fps seems to be the range my Pi can handle.
Gauntlet Legends (Dreamcast, lr-flycast): Practically unplayable on Raspberry Pi 4B.
Invasion: The Abductors, Operation Tiger, Rail Chase 2, Total Vice (Arcade, lr-mame): Technically playable on Pi, but the framerate ranges from slideshow to poor.
Time Crisis, Evil Night, NFL Blitz, or any game that uses the
iteagleBIOS (Arcade, lr-mame): These fail to work at all on Pi but seemingly work fine with the same emulator in Windows. I'm curious if there is some issue with the Pi hardware specifically. -
@ChaosEffect Gauntlet Legends is very playable on a modestly overclocked Pi4 with redream.
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Played some more with the Orange Pi 5 and all I can say is wow. It blows the pi 4 away in terms of performance. It comfortably runs all the PSP games. I'm running both the god of war psp games at 1980x1020 at 2x resolution with 60fps. Pretty much all the other games run at 4x resolution with all the other setting maxed out. N64 is smooth at 1980x1020 with 3x resolution. Dreamcast is great at 1980x1020. Many gamecube and some PS2 / Wii games run just fine.
Have played around a lot there are two easy ways to get this up and running.
The easiest is to go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/supremeretrogaming and https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1V3J2UjwXwrg3kHe8PBX7ZgAvWsUgFSfD download page. The gets you a pre-built image with most of the setup already done (with the notable exception of the ps2). They also have a patron version if you want to contribute back.
I'm also playing around with https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/releases. This is a pre-built image of ubuntu with 3d acceleration, sound, bluetooth, and a bunch of other stuff already worked out. One thing to add is "export PAN_MESA_DEBUG=gofaster" in the .bash_profile in your home directory. In benchmarking this makes the oranage pi graphics driver 2-4 times faster depending on what you are doing. You can use this as a base to install RetroPie using the following commands "git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup.git" followed by "sudo ./RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh". Install the base version then compile all the optional and experimental emulators you want. Almost everything works (including dolphin and lr_ppsspp). The only two I found that don't work are ppsspp (but lr_ppsspp works and runs blindingly fast) and lr_dolphin (but dolphin works).
PS2 is trivial to add via an AppImage from https://www.aethersx2.com/archive/?dir=desktop/linux. Once you download it use chmod to make it executable. Unfortunately as I don't yet have vulkan working you need to cripple it by running "PAN_MESA_DEBUG=gl3" before you execute the AppImage.
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@jmbooth2000 Sounds really promising! The Pi 4 has held on quite a while, but eventually you want to play more advanced MAME and etc titles. Orange Pi 5 seems like it would make a dream bartop.
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@jmbooth2000 said in Orange Pi 5:
@ChaosEffect Gauntlet Legends is very playable on a modestly overclocked Pi4 with redream.
second this on lr-flycast: Gauntlet Legends runs very well.
And i did not overclock my Pi4B. -
I'm curious how those distros compare to JELOS:
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@jmbooth2000 What do you reckon the chances of running this off a LI-ION battery is? I'm wanting to do a handheld variant and was going to use a RPI4b finally, but for similar coin i can get a 4gig OPI 5b. I also assume i can hook the basic screen up to the ribbon cable and map the GPIO's as you can with the RPI.
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Mind if I add an opinion regarding Raspberry Pi 4 and Orange Pi 5?
I've built two different RetroPie systems. A 3B+ and a 4B. Both are outstanding platforms but playing those pesky fifth gen systems just isn't working out. They are excellent for systems up to fourth gen and PS1 works very well. Anything past that and the system isn't powerful enough to keep framerate tolerable.
I looked in to something more powerful that still has a small footprint, similar to the Raspberry Pi 4 and the Orange Pi 5 piqued my interest.
However, after much research over several days that unless you need a small board to run your emulators there are vastly superior choices. Why?
The Orange Pi 5 is only about ~20% to 25% more powerful than the Raspberry Pi 4 but costs about twice as much. That hardly seems worth the trouble for the "upgrade". If it was TWICE as powerful for twice the price, then perhaps that's worth the investment.The Orange Pi 5 is about 20% larger than the Raspberry Pi 4 so that means you'll need a new case, new, more powerful power supply and likely cooling. The Orange Pi 5s are seemingly difficult to come by, even so many months after the original posting of this thread.
If you ~were~ going to invest ~$130 to make a brand new Raspberry Pi 4 OR you ~were~ going to invest about $250 to build a brand new Orange Pi 5 then you might as well go the route that I eventually took after more days of research and that is to purchase or build a mini desktop PC. I paid ~$350 for mine and it comes with a Ryzen 7 processor that can emulate anything up to Xbox 360 as it's nearly ten times more powerful than an Orange Pi 5. Also, the mini PC has a footprint about exactly twice as large as the Raspberry Pi 4 so it is still quite small. It also runs Windows 11 which means I don't have to understand a lick of Linux to get anything to run.
So, again, in my opinion, I don't honestly think the Orange Pi 5 is the best thing unless you have NO Pi board and want to build something and you understand a little Linux and don't mind things not behaving all the time. The Raspberry Pi 4B is arguably the best purchase for older emulation up to PlayStation 1, hands down. It's super stable, extremely supported, nothing experimental to cross your fingers over and it's generally readily available and the price is negligible if it burns up for some reason. I would not personally want to accidentally burn up an Orange Pi 5 board.
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@ultrakev9 said in Orange Pi 5:
The Orange Pi 5 is only about ~20% to 25% more powerful than the Raspberry Pi 4 but costs about twice as much.
The difference is much bigger than 25%, where did you get those numbers ? The GPU alone is much more more powerful than what's available on the Pi4. You price is also a bit off - where did you get the 250$ mark (remember we're not talking about the Orange PI 5 Plus, but the initial Orange Pi 5) ?
While the software support for the Orange Pi 5 leaves a lot to be desired compared to the Pi4, the hardware is much more powerful than what you describe.
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It would be interesting to see what exactly is being compared here.
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