Emulators and the R-pi

[Toad King]

Posted this in another thread, but I'm working on a port of RetroArch, an emulator frontend. So far I got accelerated video going and controls and audio are coming soon: https://github.com/ToadKing/RetroArch-Rpi

So far there's a handful of cores ported to it, but once I get the Pi version complete, I think it can be used as a good stepping stone for other emulators, since the person porting them doesn't have to worry about hardware acceleration themselves.

[isdixon]

Just wanted to say I got Spectrum Emulator Fuse working and have the sound working as well, it actually works pretty well.
I tried to get beebm working but couldn't get it going

[abishur]

Just wanted to say I got Spectrum Emulator Fuse working and have the sound working as well, it actually works pretty well.
I tried to get beebm working but couldn't get it going

Care to post what you did to get it working

[iandixon]

Sorry yes I should, I basically followed another thread


by dom » 19 Apr 2012 10:12
You also need updated start.elf from github (https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware ... aster/boot).

Something like:

sudo apt-get install alsa-utils

sudo depmod

sudo modprobe snd-bcm2835

[iandixon]

This is the link
http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... hilit=alsa

[AndrewS]

Another emulator: http://raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=63&t=7154

[yoodoo2]

Just been trying out uae - old version of the Amiga emulator, a long way behind current versions of WinUAE. Loads, starts to load adfs, but couldn't get beyond loading stages of the half dozen games I tried.

There are other, more up-to-date versions of the emulator: e-uae, fsuae and p-uae. The first is oldish but has a good SDL version (not much use on the Pi, I imagine). fsusae needs OpenGL, I believe. Puae is aimed towards portable gadgets (like the Pandora) and would be probably be the best version to have a go at.

There is also AROS, which is an open-source re-implementation of AmigaOS 3.1 (the version that came with the A1200). This runs a Workbench like-environment. There are a number of apps for AROS which will be available once they have been recompiled for ARM (AROS also runs on x86, x64, PPC and 68k).

[viceroy]

there is a video here for amiga (puae) and raspberry pi
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A35MhabP_8

[yoodoo2]

Well spotted. Couldn't track down a binary or package for puae, so it looks like I'll have to set up the cross compilers.

A bit more experimentation with a "vanilla" uae resulted in a little bit of success - managed to have a reasonably playable session with Zeewolf 2.

[fugutastic]

I've been trying to get PUAE to compile on my Pi for the last few days and I've had no luck whatsoever. I'm using the hexxeh raspbian image with the correct dependencies installed. I can botch my way through code and with some creating commenting out of bits here and there I almost got it to compile but not quite Obviously it can be done as the youtube video shows. Anyone else tried and succeeded (or failed)?

[stecklars]

Is there a working emulator to play Neo Geo games yet?

[Toad King]

Is there a working emulator to play Neo Geo games yet?

If you feel like compiling things yourself, I have an emulator frontend with a core than can run some Neo-Geo games. All the stuff you need should be here: http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewt ... =35&t=6750

Make sure you compile imame4all-libretro with ARM support otherwise you'll get horribly slow speeds.

[BenJ]

I didn't see this thread before I made mine and it was locked, so I'll post the contents of it here...

So far, I've tried two emulators to run Super Mario Brothers 3 on my Raspberry Pi. I've overclocked the CPU to 900 MHz and the RAM to 500 MHz.

mednafan was pretty slow, though better than FCE Ultra. I wasn't able to test any gameplay since I wasn't able to move at the map screen. Here's a short video:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvOkOwVqKMY

FCE Ultra was laughably slow, it took about 3-4 minutes for the curtain to come up. I didn't record this since my camera battery went flat.

[Toad King]

Almost every emulator you try will get those results. The lack of X acceleration kills any speed you might get from them. They also might use OpenGL for rendering, so the Raspberry Pi falls back on MesaGL software rasterer, which would be even slower. So far, the only two emulators that avoid this are AdvanceMAME (which renders directly to the framebuffer) and RetroArch-Rpi (which uses EGL/OpenVG).

You could try RetroArch-Rpi with the FCEU core and see if that works.

[Crook]

Is someone putting up a comprehensive how-to on installing emulators? I'd like to follow some instructions to get a speccy emulator working with sound.

[MegaGumbo]

Ok, I got the C64 emulator up and working last night - Vice.. No sound support, but otherwise it seemed to work (albeit with LOTS of pauses, the CPU meter was pegged the whole time...), and I couldn't figure out how to get it to let me type into the console, but I was able to load up some games and play a bit:

http://elinux.org/RPi_VICE_C64_Emulator

I read your post and got curious. Indeed, without some overclocking and a few tweaks to the VICE configuration parameters as well as the desktop it's not that cool.
But I got it running using some overclocking, fluxbox instead of lxde and was able to play 'night racer' with sound as long as you didn't try to polish your desk with the mouse (avoided massive mouse movement). But I don't have fullscreen mode available yet. You can find my configuration settings for VICE and the CPU/GPU below. Maybe they work for you as well. Depends on wether or not you are willing to overclock (not overvoltage!) your Pi. I'm looking forward to your feedback.

Here's the settings I tweaked in my .vicerc

Code: Select all

SoundDeviceName="sdl"
SoundSampleRate=22050
SoundFragmentSize=0
SoundBufferSize=150
SoundSuspendTime=0
SoundSpeedAdjustment=0

My /boot/config.txt contains the following settings (use at your own risk!):

Code: Select all

arm_freq=900
gpu_freq=300
init_emmc_clock=250000000

[Singularity9]

Posted this in another thread, but I'm working on a port of RetroArch, an emulator frontend. So far I got accelerated video going and controls and audio are coming soon: https://github.com/ToadKing/RetroArch-Rpi

So far there's a handful of cores ported to it, but once I get the Pi version complete, I think it can be used as a good stepping stone for other emulators, since the person porting them doesn't have to worry about hardware acceleration themselves.

This is a great idea. I am looking over your github code now, if you need a hand with anything in specific (coding wise) please let me know!

[Toad King]

Posted this in another thread, but I'm working on a port of RetroArch, an emulator frontend. So far I got accelerated video going and controls and audio are coming soon: https://github.com/ToadKing/RetroArch-Rpi

So far there's a handful of cores ported to it, but once I get the Pi version complete, I think it can be used as a good stepping stone for other emulators, since the person porting them doesn't have to worry about hardware acceleration themselves.

This is a great idea. I am looking over your github code now, if you need a hand with anything in specific (coding wise) please let me know!

If you feel like it, you can take a crack at making an OpenMAX IL audio core. I took one look at the sample hello_audio code included in the Raspberry Pi firmware and just threw up my hands and walked away.

Also, either optimizing existing cores or finding new ones that run at fullspeed on the Raspberry Pi would be great. That's where a lot of my work is now, and it's involving a lot of hunting around.

[Alan Thew]

When I get the chance (what with a million or things to do that magically get in the way) I am going to have a go at finding a suitable Amstrad CPC emulator (such as Arnold) and compiling that.

If anybody has already managed it can they give any pointers or pitfalls on the libraries involved?

I compiled arnold yesterday from the most recent sources I could find (2009-03-17) by following the links through from cpcwiki.eu. Compilation was easy, just the usual untar, configure, make procedure. It took about 20 minutes. You'll need to install the GTK+ and SDL libraries (including the dev packages) from the Debian repositories. You will also need to change the TARGET_FMT from elf32-i386 to elf32-littlearm in Makefile.in, otherwise it'll compile but not link. Can't think of anything else but let me know if you get stuck because I may have encountered it and now forgotten...

It seems to run, including sound, in X, but at about a half speed, or maybe worse. I didn't have time to play around much but Burnin' Rubber seems to start OK, and I made up a few little BASIC programs. Didn't try loading any disks or snapshots. I think as others have said it's going to be of little use until X gets accelerated; it won't run from a console.

There's another lovely CPC emulator called Roland (not to be confused with the Javascript CPC emulator) but I've not compiled that yet. I would expect performance to be similar though.

[quark]

At this point in time one of the big deals for me is the ability to run it straight off framebuffer. I had an NES one working without sound, but I re-imaged and now I can't remember which one it was or how I had to working running it through LXDE just isn't working at the moment.

I have a NES emulator working without sound, using the Debian image, will only work running through console no LXDE

sudo apt-get install fceu

cd /usr/games

./fceu -input1 gamepad -inputcfg gamepad1 /home/pi/mario_bros.zip

Command above will map gamepad buttons to your keyboard, and load game image path you specify. Appears to work fine apart from no sound, I've had a few levels on Mario Bros.

Not tried with a joypad, I have a wireless xbox360 joypad that is discovered as a usb device, but have not had chance to try to get it working yet. It doesn't work by default

I finally got fceu working with sound.
Therefore you have to know that fceu tries to use OSS as default sound driver.
If you use squeeze with ALSA you have to install alsa-oss to get sound working with fceu.

Here a short summary:
1. Load Kernel driver

Code: Select all

sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835

2. install alsa, alsa-oss

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install alsa alsa-oss

3. start fceu with aoss

Code: Select all

sudo aoss fceu ROM.nes

[BakaOsaka]

Can someone offer some advice? Whenever I try to load FCEU I get a framebuffer error. Specifically:

Code: Select all

Could not initialize sdl: DirectFBCreate: Initialization error!

How do I init the framebuffer?

[abishur]

Can someone offer some advice? Whenever I try to load FCEU I get a framebuffer error. Specifically:

Code: Select all

Could not initialize sdl: DirectFBCreate: Initialization error!

How do I init the framebuffer?

Which distro, and what did you do to run it

[BakaOsaka]

I'm using Debian Squeeze, and followed the instructions:

Code: Select all

sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835

Code: Select all

sudo aoss fceu romname.rom

When I try the second command I get the error shown above.

[abishur]

I'm using Debian Squeeze, and followed the instructions:

Code: Select all

sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835

Code: Select all

sudo aoss fceu romname.rom

When I try the second command I get the error shown above.

Odd, sudo should be able to initialize SDL... it shouldn't really matter but what's the date of the Debian squeeze image you're using? Also have you updated your firmware?

[abishur]

Also, try elevating the entire session to sudo privileges (sudo bash) and then running the command "aoss fceu romname.rom" it really shouldn't make a difference though