RetroPie on OSX MacBook via Debian via VirtualBox VM

johne79

I have this actually working on my late 2015 MacBook, believe it or not, by putting on VirtualBox and then Debian, but... I have no hardware acceleration yet. It's running in software rendering so there's a lot of tearing (frame rate's actually maybe 20-30fps because I'm on an i5 MacBook). I can't run RetroPie directly on an SD because it's x86 (amd64) and not ARM, but I installed RetroPie via Git and MOST things are well (although I'm having issues getting Urquan Masters to work).

(I also tried a dual boot into Debian on OS X, and that turned into a complete disaster. You have to use reFind you can't use Boot Camp, and I could only get the Netinst installer for Debian to work and not a Live CD over USB for some reason, and once I got Netinst going it couldn't even detect the Wifi card in my MacBook so it could go nowhere and I hit a dead end, so I had to go the VM route.)

Frame rate is the only issue because of the lack of hardware acceleration. I thought I would throw this out here on the snowball's chance in hell that someone is doing the exact same thing and has already found a solution. I'm wondering if the bottleneck is in VirtualBox, in Debian, or in RetroPie. Any ideas on things I could do to test? It would be great if I had a small test app on Debian I could use to see if hardware acceleration is at least enabled up to the VM/Debian level. VirtualBox only has an option for 3D acceleration and 2D "video" acceleration and won't enable the 2D for some reason.

This is all because my last RetroPie MicroSD card literally burned up and died on Sunday so I needed a more stable hardware platform for development and testing on RetroArch and cores. The Raspberry Pi 3 still works though amazingly, hallelujah!

johne79

Looks like glmark2 and glxgears seem to work fine, although input is slowed dramatically, the video framerate is acceptable, it claims to be >60fps, but looks kind of like 40-50ish fps.

So I'm thinking it's in the video drivers.

Using GL is causing them to be OpenGL software renderer it looks like.

Using SDL2 is causing all cores to stay in "paused" mode until rebooting, then made the RetroArch menu not respond at all to input, so I had to manually edit the configs to get back to normal. In fact it's causing the whole machine to slow to a crawl on an i5.

Using the XVIDEO driver just crashed the core back to EmulationStation (and also crashed the RetroArch config from RetroPie so I had to again edit from the command-line).

So gl is my only option, but I'm trying to figure out how to get it to recognize the hardware acceleration.

edmaul69

@johne79 would qemu work any better? It appears to be able to use windows up to xp on pi but also appears to be able to emulate a raspberry pi on a computer. Not sure if there is a mac version though.

herb_fargus

@edmaul69 qemu is primarily for building and compiling arm software rather than running it.

I would say that virtual box is a large reason for the tearing, I've had the same issue with the video drivers etc. I just had to dual boot my windows PC with Ubuntu to get satisfactory results. I don't have a Mac (and never will) so I can't really help you there.

johne79

@herb_fargus said in RetroPie on OSX MacBook via Debian via VirtualBox VM:

@edmaul69 qemu is primarily for building and compiling arm software rather than running it.

I would say that virtual box is a large reason for the tearing, I've had the same issue with the video drivers etc. I just had to dual boot my windows PC with Ubuntu to get satisfactory results. I don't have a Mac (and never will) so I can't really help you there.

I'm pretty satisfied with my MacBook Pro, it's definitely been durable. I'm running MS, Linux, and Apple hardware on my desktops/laptops/mobile. Seems like there are tradeoffs between all of my systems and some things are better on one system than another. Hence I'm doing most of my creative work in Windows (definitely it seems to support the most OSS creative software for art/music production, and I've been a C# developer since 2003ish) and most of my emulator gaming on Linux (because Linux handles time slicing so much better than Windows), and a good chunk of my mobile/work operations on Apple (emulation choices are really lacking on OS X).

I might give QEMU a shot just to see if it works, sounds a little iffy though. Would be great if RetroPie could be built on OS X and ported to homebrew like apt-get.

Capeman

@johne79 said in RetroPie on OSX MacBook via Debian via VirtualBox VM:

emulation choices are really lacking on OS X

What's wrong with OpenEmu? it's just about the best emulator i've used for any computer/laptop based platform and it's Mac exclusive. RetroPie is by far the best for TV and arcades, but running it on a macbook via virtual machine seems like alot of extra work without much benefit over the more obvious choice.

johne79

@Capeman said in RetroPie on OSX MacBook via Debian via VirtualBox VM:

@johne79 said in RetroPie on OSX MacBook via Debian via VirtualBox VM:

emulation choices are really lacking on OS X

What's wrong with OpenEmu? it's just about the best emulator i've used for any computer/laptop based platform and it's Mac exclusive. RetroPie is by far the best for TV and arcades, but running it on a macbook via virtual machine seems like alot of extra work without much benefit over the more obvious choice.

OpenEmu is ok but I like the frontend interface of EmulationStation far better, just my personal preference. OpenEmu, like EmulationStation/RetroArch, is just a frontend for all the cores. ES gives me some great options for other things like Ports, DosBox included in the menus, etc. This may in fact sound crazy, but when I'm playing any kind of console emulation system, I want everything from the frontend on down to FEEL like I'm using a console, rather than feel like I'm using a Mac, or a Linux box, or whatever. ES does such a great job of being just that, for a moment my disbelief is suspended, it feels so genuine and natural. No other little OS X X's and Minimize/Maximize buttons and other little UI elements that distract my suspension of disbelief. Plus the whole way ES handles game descriptions and the like, it's exactly what I like, no complaints here, it does what I want, just the way I want it.