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The Retropie thread - use a Raspberry Pi for the ultimate under-the-TV emulation station!

Mr. Gerbik

By Mr. Gerbik
in Retro & Arcade Gaming

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Lumpy

Lumpy

Posted
Posted

Well no I know you weren't, I was just being silly, but there is a real tendency for things like retrogaming (or anything really) to be taken away from a particular group and made a little bit elite, based on someone's perception of what is and isn't perfection, and it only needs a handful of cheerleaders before it's quoted as fact. Personally I love the egalitarian nature of the RPi. Anyone can pretty easily and cheaply grab one, learn the bits, and have a brilliant experience. No money has exchanged hands (other than for the bits) and no company owns your end experience. People are doing it for the love of both the games they played as a youth, and the open nature of both the hardware and software. I'm not for a minute saying that input lag isn't important. It bloody is, and like I say if it was both detrimental and insurmountable here on the Pi, I'd have binned it. But that isn't the case, or it hasn't been for me.

 

I think also that despite the science being displayed, we are still on many occasions dealing with people's perceptions of how the games should feel. At the end of the day you will be much like me - you played them back in the day and you know how they should feel. A great many "retrogamers" possibly haven't and have skewed ideas of the feel of games. I remember reading elsewhere a person who couldn't understand why his games felt so slow. Turned out he was using PAL roms when he'd been an NTSC gamer back in the day. I've read other people's opinions about games where they were citing "input lag" when it was nothing of the sort, and rather instead either actual slowdown on his system because it'd been overclocked too much, or accurate slowdown emulation that would have been present on the original hardware. This latter one is one you read a lot. Some people don't seem to understand the difference and what input lag actually is, but it doesn't stop them from quoting it.

 

Too many opinions, too much noise. I know what I have in front of me and I know how it should feel. I owned a massive collection of these games up until a few years ago, so I like to think I have a pretty good idea how they should behave and I don't need a chart to underline that for me. And I'm sure you're the same. ;)

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RubyJester

RubyJester

Posted
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Af'noon all. Just a quick, delighted 'me too' on the RetroPie. My Pi3 couldn't hack running a Minecraft server so it was either this or the back of the cupboard. Impressed how crisply it looks and runs.

Little exasperated at the file management required. I just want to give my sprogs a little 'classical' education: Top ten for each platform would be plenty and still result in 270 games. I downloaded a few collections from The Internet Archive and am immediately swamped! Nearly 10 000 games for the Spectrum? Nope. No way. Even with your excellent 'Recommended game lists' each single title has upwards of 15 versions. I randomly pick one that doesn't have 'JP' in the filename and so far they've worked. Could be smoother :) 

Anyway, great fun. Haven't had to modify anything. Worked straight out of the box. Lovely.

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phresh

phresh

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6 minutes ago, Dudley said:

You don't have to copy all the files to the pi, it shares by samba.

 

I was playing around with Retropie yesterday and unfortunately they are still using an old version of Samba that isn't directly supported in Windows 10 (at least from what I ready, I quickly moved over to SCP and didn't do anymore testing).

 

I'm being furloughed at the end of this week and can't get materials to build the large arcade machine i've been planning. So i'm going to make do with bits I have lying around and build a small(ish) vertical bartop. Currently downloading mame romsets so I can have some fun with clrmamepro later <_<

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phresh

phresh

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It does use v1 apparently, although this causes an issue with some installs of Windows 10. Either way, not an issue as I can just use WinSCP - might just help some people if they can't get Samba to work.

 

Pulled together the FB Neo romset last night so need to run through it and copy across the games I actually want on the machine. Ordered a joystick and some buttons (4 button Neo Geo layout) so looking forward to getting cracking on it next week.

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Yasawas

Yasawas

Posted
Posted
12 hours ago, AceGrace said:

Does RetroPie still do the thing whereby you put the roms in folders on a usb stick and it copies them over after switch on or has that all changed?

 

It does indeed, then just restart Emulationstation and you're good. Easiest way to do it.

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Lumpy

Lumpy

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1 hour ago, Stoppy2000 said:

I'm still using a pi3 - am I missing out by not upgrading to a 4?

 

Their forums say yes, but right now I say no and I'm not buying a Pi4 until drivers see real improvement. There was an interesting post from a contributor on their forum (please don't ask me to find it!) recently saying a lot of the current problems they have had with the Pi4 have been down to poor driver support from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. As tempting as it is to see an upgrade running DC and better N64, the reality is possibly that it isn't quite there yet.

 

By all means get one. You'll be good for the future as it gets better. But for me I'm absolutely fine with the 3B+ for now and possibly for the next year or so until they get topside of things. No rush. Not to mention that the Pi4 model will likely see another upgrade before too long, messing things up again for Retropie/Recalbox. I'm not advocating wait-and-see forever, you'd never buy anything! But for my uses there's little value in it just yet and my PC can pick up the improvements that the 3B+ isn't capable of for now.

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gizmo1990

gizmo1990

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Haha, fair enough. Although I do think ETA is actually highlighting relevant stuff, rather than just reading a list.

 

Regarding overclocking and fans, I find explaining computers has covered the subject really well over the years. Check out some of his content on it.

 

 

 

 

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Yasawas

Yasawas

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I thought the Switch had cured me of this but I just set up Retro Achievements on my Pi and it's pretty slick and addictive. It adds a nice wee goal to replaying the classics for the umpteenth time.

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gizmo1990

gizmo1990

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Maybe slightly OT but, has anyone been able to run Konami's SNES Tiny Toons Buster Busts Loose via Retropie without some sort of video corruption on the main screen? In game all seems well but the title screen, with the traditional Warner multicoloured circles zooming in (with the characters in the middle) is always partly corrupted halfway down.:huh: I've tried multiple builds and multiple roms and I'm still getting it. It's been irking me for ages! Has anyone else experienced the same?

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