Increase performance on a old RPi 1B?

rbaker

@Kelemvor said in Increase performance on a old RPi 1B?:

That would the default Nintendo emulator

Which one?

@Kelemvor said in Increase performance on a old RPi 1B?:

I used the ISO from the retropie website

This is funny. Which one exactly? Name it. You would be surprised that people download the wrong one.

Good Luck.

pi_guy

I'm having the same issue on nes. it has to be an issue with the image, cause using the same hardware with v1.9 it runs fine. Is there any way to downgrade the nes emulator or make it less bloated?

BuZz

@pi_guy Open a new topic - also please do not post a support request without first reading and following the advice in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

trafsta

@Kelemvor I'm very new to Retropie (few weeks) but now use three Raspberry Pi 3's as my main systems for my family, but the first Raspberry Pi I had tried Retropie on before buying Rasp Pi 3's was the original Rasp Pi (a '0' or possibly a '1' or whatever the very first version was called) . Running the latest version of Retropie (as of about 2 weeks ago) my NES games ran slow... and I did the same thing as you and tried overclocking, and while that helped it still wasn't great. However, the simple way for me to fix it was to press a button when loading up any NES rom and configure your video settings to something lower like 640x480... after that it ran all my NES games very smoothly. I still use this same Raspberry Pi for just NES/SNES/Genesis games, works well for those older systems.

Again, I'm new to all of this, but I'm betting this will solve your issue.

BuZz

@trafsta by default the rpi0/1 image has retroarch render resolution set to 640x480 so it should be fine out of the box (just need to add a medium overclock).

Older images were "overclocked" by default, but we leave it up to the user now so that might be why they thought older versions were quicker. There should not be any performance decrease.

trafsta

@BuZz Well maybe I set it down to 320x240 then, I can't remember for sure. All I know is that Retropie 4.1 installed on my first gen RaspPi around 2-3 weeks ago, even when overclocked, was slow (music sounded funky)... and I remember lowering the resolution to fix it... sound/music was smooth after lowing the video res. I can check in a few days to see what resolution I set it to. Worth a shot for these guys to see if it fixes their problem. Other systems, like Genesis, worked fine without messing around with the video res. Very cool to have my 1st gen Rasp Pi useful again though. I stopped using it for Kodi years ago so it was just collecting dust.

pi_guy

Thanks for the suggestion, but I already tried lowing the resolution to 320x240 and it didn't make a difference performance wise for me. Are you sure you don't have a pi 2? Easy way to tell is the pi 1 only has 2 usb ports, pi 2 and 3 have 4.

This isn't a made up problem, i've seen multiple posts here and on reddit but no real answers. I know how to overclock the pi, and i know the old images were overclocked by default. The only way i've found to run nes games full speed is the turbo OC, but that will freeze the system after a few mins.

Medium OC definately doesn't cut it with 4.1. I suggest you try it yourself with a p 1 B model if you still don't believe me.

BuZz

@pi_guy I run a 4.1 on a pi1 downstairs and last time i checked nes was full speed - I dont think my overclock was at turbo levels.

pi_guy

@BuZz this is with default image settings except for medium OC? it just seems like something is wrong when i can run snes and mame games at full speed while nes struggles with super mario bros.

trafsta

Just to clarify yes I have 2 USB ports on my Rasp Pi.

I reinstalled 4.1 on it yesterday and am currently copying a rom collection back over to it. I'll try to check tonight to see if they run smoothly or not.