Orange Pi 5
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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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@ultrakev9 interesting take, for an apples to apples comparison i noticed the 4gig RPI4b was 100AUD and i can source a 4gig OPI5B for about 130AUD. One thng i liked better was the m.2 support to use a SSD over the SD card. What i wasnt sure about was the power draw and if i could actually make it portable/battery powered as it seems to need 5v 5A which is a bit.
considering the cost between boards is minimal in my opinion, would the OPI actually play some of those "peaky" systems you mention?
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From what I've seen PS2 and Gamecube/Wii are the systems that stand out on the OPi5 that the RPi4 can't handle. I have hear these are patchy though even on the OPi5, but I imagine you'd get a lot more out of some of the less demanding systems that are at the edge of the RPi4's capabilities. Getting completely smooth PS2 and Gamecube/Wii on a Windows PC requires fairly high spec for some of the most demanding games.
You can pick up one of those Dell mini PC's for around 130AUS (if my conversion math is right). The one I found was an I3 (no gen specified) with 8GB of ram and a 120GB SSD.
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@George-Spiggott thanks, one of the reasons i wanted to use the SBC was due to being 5v and trying to design a handheld variant. Otherwise i would be all over a intel or AMD setup with a old GPU
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I think a comparison of the Orange Pi5 and a cheap second hand Dell of comparable price running stuff just out of reach of the RPi4 such as demanding PSP and N64 games and less demanding PS2 and Gamecube/Wii games would make for an interesting YouTube video. Not that such a thing would be within my capabilities.
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I think I saw some ETA prime video where he took an old office dell and probably added some bits to make it work better. Very cheap for sure and probably ended up more powerful than an OPi5. But you then have a much bigger form factor and not the exciting funsies of an Arm chip.
Some recent news regarding more focused(?) support for Arm Mali Mesa,
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/a-helping-arm-for-panfrost.html
https://www.arm.com/company/news/2023/07/arm-expands-open-source-partnershipsIv'e been creeping a bit on the Panfrost IRC and they do talk about Vulkan support and improved performance for the Opi5 Mali chip (I forget the name, G610 ?) but not for a few more months still (3-4 ?) if I interpreted the chatter correctly.
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@RedMarsBlueMoon said in Orange Pi 5:
Very cheap for sure and probably ended up more powerful than an OPi5. But you then have a much bigger form factor and not the exciting funsies of an Arm chip.
Agreed, there's a playoff in a number of areas but it would be interesting to see what performs best in a pure cash vs capability play off. Going rate for the 8GB model Opi5 seems to be around £70, it's actually quite hard to compare like for like as the Dells are second hand and come with additional parts the Opi5 doesn't (case, PSU storage). I found an Optiplex 3020M (i3 4150T, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD) for £65. I also found this video of games being run on a very similar build.
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I have installed Retropie on an OrangePi 5 plus using the installation script from the Ubuntu Jammy Server image from the OrangePi website.
Everything works splendidly (tested GameCube performance at 2x resolution and it worked well), except I can't figure out how to get HDMI audio working.
I had a similar experience in the past with a RaspberryPi build, which was resolved through alsamixer. However, I don't see any options in "orangepi-config" to change the audio device.
Has anyone here had this issue and managed to solve it?
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@DarklyAdonic said in Orange Pi 5:
I have installed Retropie on an OrangePi 5 plus using the installation script from the Ubuntu Jammy Server image from the OrangePi website.
Does it have PulseAudio installed ? You can use
pacmdto choose the default audio device (pacmd set-default-sink). -
I was able to get it working by:
-Installing PulseAudio:
sudo apt install pulseaudio -y-Finding the name of the HDMI sink by using:
pacmd list-sinks | grep -e 'name:' -e 'index:'then:
sudo nano /etc/pulse/default.paThen adding a line at the end:
set-default-sink YOURSINKNAMEFor some reason, the emulation station sound settings still show "0%" as the volume regardless of input or card, but I'm not going to look a gift-horse in the mouth.
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I hit another snag with autolaunching emulationstation. I found a solution but it's not ideal.
Autolaunch through RetroPie-Setup (via autostart.sh) doesn’t work with Opi5 plus.
I made my own autostart.sh with the same contents and tried running it with crontab and bashrc.
While both methods successfully load the ES GUI, neither can successfully start a game.
Crontab method had no sound and it seems terminal is still accepting any keystrokes in the background. After launching a game, it crashes to terminal when any button is pressed.
Bashrc method had double sound (two clicks for menu navigation) and when I launch a game it starts flickering and boots me back to ES Gui after I press any button.
However, when I close and manually restart ES from terminal it works perfectly.
I made a brute-force workaround by changing my autostart.sh script to:
"
emulationstation
killall emulationstation
emulationstation
"This launch ES, I close it, then it immediately relaunches and works properly
If anyone knows what I'm doing wrong so I can get a proper autolaunch, I would be much obliged.
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Weirdly, RetroPie is only working properly on certain TVs for me.
On my old "dumb" 1080p TV, RetroPie works perfectly.
However, on my new 4K smart TV (LG OLED77CXPUA), EmulationStation crashes after I exit emulation of a game (regardless of system). Error message is the standard "Emulation Station Crashed! If this is your first..."
Hardware is OrangePi 5 with Ubuntu 22.04 (Josh Reik Ubuntu for Rockchip).
Anyone else been having a similar issue?
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@jlegenzo said in Orange Pi 5:
However, on my new 4K smart TV (LG OLED77CXPUA), EmulationStation crashes after I exit emulation of a game (regardless of system). Error message is the standard "Emulation Station Crashed! If this is your first..."
The real error is in
$HOME/.emulationstation/es_log.txt, maybe try opening the file and see what's the last logged message.Anyone else been having a similar issue?
HDMI on the OrangePi 5 is hit-or-miss, I wouldn't be surprised if it's caused by it. Or maybe caused by the Wayland support in the SDL version that's bundled with the distro ?
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For me sometimes a monitor would work with USB-C when HDMI didn't and vice versa.
But its been a while since I tinkered with this so might be out of date and I was testing with experimental kernel builds sometimes.I also read this morning,
"Orange Pi has the option "NoEDID" "true" for X11 which you could try"
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I checked the error log and only one things was marked error:
"Error - folder with path "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/amstra>"Since it seemed like an easy fix, I made a folder with that name in my roms directory and restarted. The issue seems to have been resolved because I can exit games without crashing. Seems strange that a missing folder would only cause a crash for certain TVs, but I'm glad it works.
Thanks for the suggestions
Full error log:
Oct 15 13:11:01 lvl2: EmulationStation - v2.11.2rp, built Aug 17 2023 - 14:45>
Oct 15 13:11:01 lvl2: Parsing XML file "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulation>
Oct 15 13:11:01 lvl2: Parsing XML file "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulation>
Oct 15 13:11:01 lvl2: Parsing XML file "/opt/retropie/supplementary/emulation>
Oct 15 13:11:01 lvl2: Creating window...
Oct 15 13:11:02 lvl2: Created window successfully.
Oct 15 13:11:02 lvl2: GL vendor: Panfrost
Oct 15 13:11:02 lvl2: GL renderer: Mali-G610 (Panfrost)
Oct 15 13:11:02 lvl2: GL version: OpenGL ES 3.1 Mesa 23.0.0-devel
Oct 15 13:11:02 lvl2: Checking available OpenGL extensions...
Oct 15 13:11:02 lvl2: ARB_texture_non_power_of_two: MISSING
Oct 15 13:11:03 lvl2: Loading system config file /etc/emulationstation/es_sys>
Oct 15 13:11:03 lvl1: Error - folder with path "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/amstra>
Oct 15 13:11:03 lvl1: System "amstradcpc" has no games! Ignoring it.
Oct 15 13:11:03 lvl1: System "arcade" has no games! Ignoring it.
Oct 15 13:11:03 lvl2: Parsing XML file "/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/>
Oct 15 13:11:03 lvl1: System "atari5200" has no games! Ignoring it.
Oct 15 13:11:03 lvl2: Parsing XML file "/home/pi/.emulationstation/gamelists/>
Oct 15 13:11:03 lvl1: System "atari800" has no games! Ignoring it.
Oct 15 13:11:03 lvl1: System "atarilynx" has no games! Ignoring it. -
Has anyone had success with the Orange Pi 5b and connecting multiple Bluetooth controllers?
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@DarklyAdonic which script did you use?
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