Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement

[Brunnis]

Been playing around a bit with my Pi 5 and RetroPie manually installed on Pi OS Lite 64-bit. Set kernel=kernel8.img in config.txt, as well as force_turbo=1. RetroPie seems to work fine and HDMI audio works from the get-go. I've tested some SNES and N64:

Note: I used 1920x1080 as output resolution for all tests so far.

• The default emulator for SNES is lr-snes9x. Tested Yoshi's Island and played around with video_threaded, max_swapchain_images and frame_delay to see what the additional performance of the Pi 5 affords us in terms of latency reduction. With video_threaded=0 and max_swapchain_images=2, frame_delay could be set all the way up to 12 ms. If I set 13 ms, the title screen of Yoshi's Island would start to stutter. This is a great result. I also tried setting max_swapchain_images to 3 again and then tested how high I could set frame-delay, just to get an idea of how much time the Pi 5 needs to render a frame. Turns out 15 ms was the max while still running at full speed. That means the Pi 5 needed at most 1.67 ms to render each frame. Pretty impressive.
• I also enabled the zfast_crt_standard shader. This appeared to need an additional ~1 ms to render, i.e. I had to reduce the frame delay by 1 ms to maintain full speed.

Tried a few N64 games as well. The default emulator is lr-mupen64plus-next. I left everything at default (including any latency-reducing RetroArch settings).

• Mario 64 ran without issues in the first level.
• Shadows of the Empire runs much better than it ever did on the Pi 4. A few stutters in the intro. Just a couple of stutters during the snowspeeder levels. Played the snowspeeder levels and a couple of minutes of the second level and it worked great. Can't vouch for the rest of the game though, of course.
• Ocarina of Time has a bit of stuttering in the intro (I didn't try playing yet). It's greatly improved over the Pi 4, though.
• Mario Tennis has severe stuttering when the "glowing ball" effect is applied as you hit it over to the other side. When those effects are not showing it seems to run fine. Obviously not playable due to this issue, though.

It's possible slightly better N64 performance could be had by reducing output resolution to 640x480, but I wouldn't expect any miracles. So, while the Pi 5 handles N64 much better than the Pi 4, it seems it's still not enough. We need even faster hardware or an improvement in how we emulate this console. Maybe other N64 emulators will fare slightly better for some games.

[windg]

It looks that the system can handle some Wii games. I try Xenoblade Chronicles and it's running very well.

[retropieuser555]

If anyone wants to try out lr-parallel-n64, add this line into /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-core-options.cfg

parallel-n64-cpucore = "cached_interpreter"

The default dynamic_recompiler will right now cause a segment fault due to the 4kb vs 16kb virtual memory pages issue. So as far as I can tell we don't need the temporary kernel solution, as flycast has been corrected on GitHub and if you make the interpreter changes to the various mupen64plus & lr-parallel-64 options it all runs happily.

Also strangely compared to the pi 4, lr-parallel-64 using goldeneye the snow texture glitch has now gone. So that's nice.

[mitu]

@retropieuser555 said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

So as far as I can tell we don't need the temporary kernel issue, as flycast has been corrected on GitHub and if you make the interpreter changes to the various mupen64plus & lr-parallel-64 options it all runs happily.

Yeah, I doubt this is the end of it. dosbox-staging also doesn't run with the default RPI kernel config, so the issue is probably affecting anything with a JIT. Note that detecting at runtime compile time the kernel memory paging configuration is not a solution when cross-compiling or if the user changes the kernel in config.txt.

[windg]

And lr-pcsx-rearmed is affected from the memory page issue.

[retropieuser555]

@mitu you're probably right, in my mind I was looking at 3D based consoles so having a quick run around the cores and emulators those seemed to be the ones that didn't like the kernel issue. But you're right, given there's dozens of cores and emulators it could affect any of them.

@windg did you try lr-beetle-psx? I've had a lot of success with that emulator, I always figured lr-pcsx-rearmed so a hacky solution for slow Arm based machines? Whereas with the pi 5 it's probably fair to say we're beyond the slow aspect.

Oh btw, Mario Golf, Mario Tennis, Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon (edit NBA Hangtime & Donald Duck Goin' Quackers). Off hand I know these are all games that have glitches or don't play well on lr-mupen64plus-nx or the standalone. I tried them in lr-parallel-n64 at first they weren't great. Then I switched the GFX Plugin to angrylion and they play very well.

[windg]

@retropieuser555 Yes i have try it and it's working very well!

[hawkes_84]

@retropieuser555 yeah that snow thing always annoyed me. Good to know

[windg]

Does someone has test the standalone Dolphin ?

[retropieuser555]

@windg I did try it, but could only get it working on the desktop environment for now. I wondered about some roundabout solution using wayfire configs to load dolphin then close it when it's done, but that seems silly to do when ultimately someone will fix the underlaying video output problem?

@mitu I got dosbox-staging working btw, it needs the core option set to auto from dynamic here inside /home/pi/.dosbox/dosbox-staging.conf

[cpu]
#      core: CPU Core used in emulation. auto will switch to dynamic if available and
#            appropriate.
#            Possible values: auto, dynamic, normal, simple.

core = auto
cputype   = auto
cycles    = auto
cycleup   = 10
cycledown = 20

I did only test Championship Manager 93 though, so I can't vouch for what games will and won't work

[mbrennock]

@windg I was wondering if there was a way I could help test Retropie on the Raspberry Pi 5? I don't have a lot of Retropie programming experience, but I am a programmer. I can work my way through problems if I have enough information to get a handle on things. I should also receive my Raspberry pi 5 in the mail soon.

[windg]

@mbrennock If you like to test RetroPie with Pi5 you have to do a a manual install on top of Bookworm Lite : https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Manual-Installation/ . Then you can report here the issues or in the github page, and if you have the knowledge to help developers to fix them.

[pi5gamer]

Will the 64-bit bookworm lite work with the Dev version of retropie if I install it via ssh

[mitu]

@pi5gamer said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

Will the 64-bit bookworm lite work with the Dev version of retropie if I install it via ssh

Yes. But there's no 'dev' version of RetroPie, just the regular one. Read on the rest of the topic to see what configuration are needed on the Pi5.

NOTE: Support for the Pi5 is a work in progress, so some things will not work or be broken - don't expect them to be fixed immediately. Also, unless you have Linux or some prior RetroPie experience, I'd recommend to wait until something stable/more polished comes up.

[pi5gamer]

@mitu

Can I download Retropie 4.8 image for the pi 4 from the GitHub and use that and also emulation station keeps on crashing when I load it up and I think its because of the amount of ram available to my GPU how do I fix this.

Thanks in Advance for your help

[mitu]

@pi5gamer No, that won't work. The Pi5 needs a newer OS and kernel/firmware which are not included in our images (Pi4 or not).

You need to install the latest RasPi OS Lite (bookworm) first and then install RetroPie manually on-top of it. As I said, if you're not familiar with Linux and haven't worked with RetroPie before, then it's better to wait for an actual release.

[moio]

The only minor issue I encountered (manual install on top of Lite) is an error installing Kodi from packages:

Sorry, but kodi is not installable for your OS/Platform via RetroPie-Setup

apt install kodi worked.

Should I open a GitHub issue?

[mitu]

@moio said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

Should I open a GitHub issue?

No, it's a known issue with kodi and RaspiOS Bookworm. Has been reported to the RaspiOS folks. Also, Pi5/Bookwom support is preliminary, so there's no use to open issues for it.

[retropieuser555]

Has anyone seen a query on raspberry pi forums, bookworm or dolphin GitHub why you can load Dolphin, AetherSX2 via GUI but not while in terminal/CLI and you get that QT5 error above?

It seems odd and I'm not quite sure where the issue is, as it occurs on Ubuntu 23.10 & raspberry Pi OS Bookworm. So it doesn't seem a problem specific to the OS? Or it's purely hardware (pi or arm64) specific? As it seems to occur on pi4 using bookworm as well

[windg]

Without have the knowledge, maybe the package for qt5 or qt6 is missing (qtbase5-dev). I haven't check this emulators yet, so the above is just a guess .