PSX framerate drop.
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I've been emulating some classic PSX games on my Raspberry Pi 3 with Retropie. The problem I'm having is that Spyro 2 and 3 are not running at a consistent framerate. Is this due to the lack of power from the Pi 3, or is it the emulator itself that is causing the problem?
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I personally have not experienced any significant performance problems with PSX emulation on the Raspberry Pi 3. In native resolution with no overclocks all games I've tried run flawlessly. In comparison to the n64, dreamcast, and saturn, the PSX is extremely easy to emulate. That being said your issue is more likely to be software or emulator related than hardware related, but the PSX emulator included with RetroPie is pretty solid so I don't find this particularly likely either. I find it to be more likely that you are somehow underclocked by a bad config.txt setting, or your CPU is somehow being over-utilized by background tasks.
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Another thing comes to mind. If your particular game is constantly streaming data from the SD card (ISO Image residing there), if that stream gets interrupted the game can momentarily freeze. Is this what is happening? If so, there are two things you can do about it. First get a high performance SD card like the one below.
Second, overclock the SD card reader using the following guide. But be warned, this seems to disable the built in WiFi, so I only recommend if you are using Ethernet. This does not seem to damage the wifi module in my experience, just makes it unable to communicate with the system, resetting the clock to normal will allow you to use wifi again. I'm speculating that the SD card reader and the WiFi module share the same bus or something, and the WiFi module cannot take the increased clock.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2016/how-overclock-microsd-card-reader-on-raspberry-pi-3
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Just tried Spyro 3 on a pi 2 - didn't see any obvious framerate issues.
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@drake999 Thank you for the reply. What's happening is in certain areas of the games, the framerate will decrease significantly with the audio crackling and popping. Like you said, the retropie's emulator is solid and should have no problems running it and the Pi 3 should do the job fine as well. I'm going to try the suggestions you've made. Is this a transfer rate issue? If overclocking the card reader doesn't work, maybe I can try running the ISO's straight from a USB drive.
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@skooballew update lr-pcsx_rearmed from binary via the setup scipt.
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@dankcushions My apologies, I am very new to this. Do I type in sudo ~/RetroPie-Setup/retropie_setup.sh in the command prompt to get to this option?
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@skooballew yes, or just go to the retropie setup option in the retropie section of emulation station :)
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Could be a number of things. When using overlays for scanlines on the pi3 I cant get 60fps. If i disable overlays then I get 60fps on many games.
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@skooballew Based on your description of the problem, it sounds to me like it very well could be a transfer rate issue. Some cards are under-performers on the Pi, so you need to be careful which card you select. As a rule don't get a cheap card. I did experiment with a USB thumb drive for ROM storage, and though it resolved the problem, it created a bunch of other issues, the worst of which was Samba no longer worked correctly. Therefore my recommendation is a fast card like the Sandisk Extreme (Not Ultra) series.
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