Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement

skankieflank

Does anyone here know if it will make any difference for emulation if I purchase a Pi5 4gb or 8gb?

retropieuser555

@skankieflank said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

Does anyone here know if it will make any difference for emulation if I purchase a Pi5 4gb or 8gb?

It's unlikely to make a difference. RAM is generally useful if you run lots of applications at once. The nature of RetroPie is you're only running a small number of applications and processes at a time. 8GB Pi4 for example was huge overkill.

Except for that later revisions of the pi4 4GB & 8GB could be overclocked higher; that wasn't due to the RAM though. It's because they were board revisions

skankieflank

@retropieuser555

That makes sense but might the newer version of RetroPie require more memory or use memory in a different way?

retropieuser555

@skankieflank said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

@retropieuser555

That makes sense but might the newer version of RetroPie require more memory or use memory in a different way?

Guess more a question for @mitu but I don't see why. Unless the standard became 4k display mode, higher resolution images or videos. Even then you wouldn't see that much of a strain I don't think, as even at the moment video snaps aren't particularly draining on the system. And the drain is more likely to be GPU than RAM.

Ultimately I can't see a situation where RetroPie would attempt to load lots of programs at once like a desktop computer would.

Background tasks > Emulationstation > Retroarch (or standalone Emulator) + few more background tasks

From a RAM standpoint unless Emulationstation or Retroarch suddenly become a lot less lightweight. Or maybe if a different frontend that's more intensive is used. Even then it's more likely to drain GPU than RAM

mitu

@skankieflank said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

That makes sense but might the newer version of RetroPie require more memory or use memory in a different way?

We don't create the programs that are installated - if future OS/emulators will require more memory, then you'll need more memory. Not something that is controlled by RetroPie, but also not something that's I see changing drastically (i.e. more memory required) in the near future.

If you intend to get a Pi5, then the base model with 4Gb should be enough, even on a 64bit OS.
Same advice was given for a Pi4 - if you want to use your Raspberry Pi for more than emulation and as a desktop /server system, then check the requirements for the applications you want to run and perhaps more memory would be needed (i.e. running Chrome, an IDE, file server/NAS, etc.)

skankieflank

@mitu thanks for your insight. Its very helpful when trying to work out a budget. My hope for the next RetroPie version for the pi5 is to emulate all the current supported emulators but with more power for some systems like mame and possibly an addition of GameCube.

Darksavior

@windg I re-tested lr-beetle-psx. It looks like I set some setting wrong so I started over. New tests with Ghost in the Shell (that one got slowdowns unlike Tekken 3) 4k crt-pi shader and everything else at defaults: gl 60fps, glcore 48fps, and 40fps vulkan. Gl and glcore would default to software mode. 2x res worked only in vulkan.

Retroarch won't show you the real fps unless you goto the retroarch menu while the game is running so I used that measurement. You can have a game telling you it's 60fps but the video is jerky. I've noticed vulkan makes things much slower so all my emulators are using gl.

lr-swanstation runs fullspeed at 4k with the crt-pi shader. 2x internal res is only fullspeed at 1080p.

mitu

@Darksavior said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

I've noticed vulkan makes things much slower so all my emulators are using gl.

You can try switching to the glcore driver, but you'll have to manually download the slang shaders from https://github.com/libretro/slang-shaders. The upstream glsl-shaders repo at https://github.com/libretro/glsl-shaders has also added a lot of 'crt' shaders that you may want to try.

windg

@Darksavior Thank you very much for the tests!

Darksavior

@mitu I've been enabling retroarch's online updater and installing the shaders that way. I really wanted the crt-royale shader to work but the pi5 is just too weak for it. I tried glcore but I also got a low fps. While lr-beetle-psx did use software mode for it, I noticed a lower fps with glcore and vulkan on all the emulators I tried. Maybe the mesa drivers need to be updated for it. I will try pikiss's vulkan/mesa updater whenever it works with bookworm/pi5.

mitu

@Darksavior said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

Maybe the mesa drivers need to be updated for it. I will try pikiss's vulkan/mesa updater whenever it works with bookworm/pi5.

I doubt that will yield better results. The version of Mesa included in RaspiOS is a modified/patched one to include the Pi5 driver. The driver is not - yet - part of any official MESA release, so updating Mesa may actually break your setup.

retropieuser555

@mitu said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

@Darksavior said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

Maybe the mesa drivers need to be updated for it. I will try pikiss's vulkan/mesa updater whenever it works with bookworm/pi5.

I doubt that will yield better results. The version of Mesa included in RaspiOS is a modified/patched one to include the Pi5 driver. The driver is not - yet - part of any official MESA release, so updating Mesa may actually break your setup.

Is that why the couple of YouTubers couldn't get Dolphin and AetherSX2 working on Raspberry Pi OS but could on the Ubuntu 20.10 build do you think?

mitu

@retropieuser555 said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

Is that why the couple of YouTubers couldn't get Dolphin and AetherSX2 working on Raspberry Pi OS but could on the Ubuntu 20.10 build do you think?

I haven't paying attention to this and haven't watched all the videos published, maybe the reason they were using Ubuntu is because installing the emulators was easier (using flatpak ?) than on RaspiOS.

Simrose

I just got my pi5 and wondering if its possible to get retropie installed manually or are we supposed to wait for an official release on the retropie.org.uk website?

thanks
Sim

mitu

You can install manually if you wish, the basic things should work by now.
Note that - since Bullseye - there's no longer a default user included in the OS and upon 1st boot you'll be prompted to create one. You can skip this step if your use the RPI imager to write the image and optn the advanced options to set the name and pass of the default user. The RetroPie image pre-sets the user automatically, but if you're starting from a Lite image you'll need to either configure it in RPI Imager or set it up on 1st boot.

Simrose

@mitu
Thanks for replying.

I setup Raspi OS 64-Bit Lite using Pi Imager.
Is the recommended way to install retropie from terminal by following the guide at https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Manual-Installation/

EDIT: I found a guide on youtube and now have RetroPie installed.

Thanks
Sim

mitu

@Simrose said in Raspberry Pi 5 - official announcement:

Is the recommended way to install retropie from terminal by following the guide at https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Manual-Installation/

Yes.

Simrose

@mitu
Thanks the official guide from https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Manual-Installation/ worked perfect!
The youtube guide was the same.

I always find the documentation for RetroPie to be excellent.

The installation part has been taking a good amount of time at the stage of processing getting sources for sdl2.
I think this will be normal for a new install.
Everything Installed as it should now looking forward to testing some games.

Brunnis

Doesn’t really seem like there is any widespread availability of Pi 5’s yet. It’s weird that Eben Upton proclaimed that the Pi 5 was now available in his Oct 23 blog post and that they were actually ahead of schedule. That’s 1.5 weeks ago and I don’t really think I’ve seen any reports of this thing actually being delivered within the EU (aside from priority orders). Most forums (including this one) seem suspiciously devoid of Pi 5 related posts as well. It does seem the UK has received some quantities at least. Other than that, it’s hard to see where the supposedly several tens of thousands of boards have gone. I’ve been following along since the Pi 2 was launched and this one has been pretty weird so far.

Anyway, I have two Pi 5s on order (one 8GB and one 4GB) since Sep 28. Hopefully they’ll be delivered in the coming week. The reseller seems just as clueless as me as to when the boards will arrive, though.

hawkes_84

@Brunnis I have the same order coming. Hoping next week sometime