PSP almost perfect but frequent io transfers cause freeze

[xd3l]

Which overclocking settings are these games being tested with. Not all the notes are clear.
I am on 1000Mhz my self, running off HD.

[labelwhore]

As I posted above, here are my overclock settings. 1000 mghz was not enough for the games to run smoothly for me. I kissed my warranty goodbye to get PSP to run well enough.

gpu_mem_256=128
gpu_mem_512=256
gpu_mem_1024=384
gpu_mem=384
arm_freq=1100
core_freq=550
sdram_freq=500
over_voltage=4

force_turbo=1
avoid_pwm_pll=1
v3d_freq=450

It’s worth noting that I did my homework before applying these:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=107149

There is another thread I used for reference on the pi forums as well, but I don’t have that link. I didn’t use anything that was reported to be unstable by any other users.

[xd3l]

Is that what this list goes by is the reports people who’s Pi’s are overclocked beyond 100Mhz?

[labelwhore]

I think people are just using whatever settings they have and are filling in the list. I can’t be certain, but that’s what I believe is going on. For example, there were a few games in there that are listed as being slow in the comments but are listed as working, that are not at all slow for me.

Whenever I update the list, I try to give a little wiggle room for performance.

I believe most people don’t want to void any warranty they may have on the PI, and are sticking with 1000 mhz. For me, I view the cost of the pi as pretty negligible, so if I blow it up with the aggressive overclock, I’ll just replace it.

[xd3l]

I’m probably going to over clock mine as well, and for the same reasons (plus Dreamcast). I am wondering though if the 3 Piece Copper Heat Sink set off Amazon is what I should hold out for, or if the two piece copper alternative on Ebay is safe as well.

[labelwhore]

I’m using a two piece one that has a fan on the larger of the two.

I don’t actually see the same one I’m using on Amazon anymore, but there is one on ebay. Probably the same one you’re looking at.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/like/161707217728?ul_noapp=true&chn=ps&lpid=82

[xd3l]

That’s the one. Now my next problem is getting an additional fan in my casing. I’m looking at 25mm fans on Ebay which go for a couple bucks, and should fit nicely inside my Playstation 1 case. My only concern is whether or not it will be enough.

This will be my second Pistation, with it, I want to also rig up a compact USB hub that runs off it’s own power, that will connect with the Pi’s power pack, at the back of the Playstations power connector inside the casing.

[zerojay]

I’m using an overclock of 1067mhz. I have not needed to use force_turbo to get the games running well. I’m not using a heatsink or fan and my Pi never goes over 53 degrees.

[labelwhore]

[quote=118281]I’m using an overclock of 1067mhz. I have not needed to use force_turbo to get the games running well. I’m not using a heatsink or fan and my Pi never goes over 53 degrees.

[/quote]I’m not sure force turbo is even necessary, one of the posts I read recommended it, but I’m not sure it’s helping me. I haven’t done any testing around that setting. I simply copied my OC settings from the thread I posted since there was a ton of data around stability and they seemed to be the most stable out of what was tested. So far, no issues here.

[xd3l]

Here are my settings. I commented out extra “gpu_mem” entries that I found.

Seems to be stable, and PSP is certainly faster now!

Using with basic heat sinks.

EDIT: Unstable, reverted back to 1000Mhz. Need advice.

# Enable audio (loads snd_bcm2835)
dtparam=audio=on
#gpu_mem_256=128
#gpu_mem_512=256
#gpu_mem_1024=256
#overscan_scale=1
gpu_mem_256=128
gpu_mem_512=256
gpu_mem_1024=384
overscan_scale=1
arm_freq=1067
core_freq=533
sdram_freq=466
over_voltage=4
max_usb_current=1

[zerojay]

Mine more or less match your settings here except that I have my sdram_freq at 483. (500 was unstable.) I also do not have max_usb_current set, whatever that does.

[xd3l]

max_usb_current allows you to use a large external hard drive, without it, they just click and do not power up.

[xd3l]

Solution…

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

[cooky069]

just a heads up guys. i’ve upgraded to a new pi3 and the freezing has pretty much stopped altogether now. i get a very slight pause sometimes, just a small fraction of a second. psp performance is now much better as a whole. i can see that once overclocked it will be almost perfect, for me at least

[xd3l]

Thought so! Thanks for the heads up, I’m in the US so I’m still waiting on mine.

[g0nz0uk]

Just ordered my pi3 and I’m interested in getting my old psp games working, do you know if the wipeout games work well?

[xd3l]

Still waiting on my Pi 3s to arrive, so I tinkered with over clocking again and settled with this:

arm_freq=1050
core_freq=525
sdram_freq=450
over_voltage=3

Using a standard USB stick I don’t need extra voltage to the USB, which seems to conflict with over clocking, so it’s either that or a hard drive that can power itself.

[joyrider3774]

i’ve got a rpi3 and retropie 3.6 and i must say i’m not impressed what so ever with the psp speed. I’m using ppsspp not lr-ppsspp which is supposedly faster. I tried messing with all the settings and hacks but none seem to be good working for me. Some do have possitive impact like of course the multhithreading, some speed hacks (i tried all of them).

Games i tried were tekken 6, medievil resurection, star ocean 2. In star ocean 2 even with 4x frameskip the pi3 still doesn’t manage to run it smoothly and even slows down (you have to play it till the guy gets teleported to another world and rescue’s that girl, so after the 1st fight, it gets worse when you get in the girls home town) when you just start the game it looks good at the beginning but just after the first fight the slowdown begins. none of the above games run full speed with my pi3 and need a high frameskip. Sometimes they start off good but quickly become a slow motion mess.

I even made some ppsspp builds myselve with -mtune=cortex-a53 & mcpu=cortext-a53 flags as well as a few other optimasation flags but i did not see any noticeable diffrence (i do see a diffrence between lr-ppsspp and plain ppsspp lr-ppsspp’s performance is far worse although that was noted in the wiki as well).

Could it be that the overlocked rpi2’s with the settings above are faster than a raspberry pi 3 ? Also when it comes to overclocking a raspberry pi 3 i’m not certain if there’s a lot of margin. When i was buildin ppsspp on the pi 3 itselve using 4 cores (there all 4 almost constantly at 100% my pi3 (internal) temprature sensor showed 82 °C !!! so heatsinks will probably be needed if any overclocking might be done.

I also have not tried overlocking the pi3 but by default, by using the raspberry pi config item it says “this pi can’t be overclocked” not sure about specifing settings config.txt though but i’m not keen on trying that when the pi3 gets that hot on stock settings (under full load for a while)

[xd3l]

Are you running off of SD?

This is the first PSP related complaint from a Pi 3 user I have heard. Even over clocking a little on the Pi 2 goes a long way.

[joyrider3774]

yup running retropie over sd card using samsung evo 32gb class 10 micro sd. My iso’s are on a hard disk.

I don’t know really maybe i’m looking to hard at the fps but fully playable should be running smoothly at 60/60 fps withouth frameskip well that’s fullspeed at least. Pi3 can’t handle that (probably can for certain 2d games) Even frameskip 1-3 is not showing 100% speed in fps counter i can see the percentage going down quite a lot.

So i’m not certain what the problem might be either i’m too focused on the fps counter or others are not ? Later today i’m going to test a few other / older games and see how they perform

[xd3l]

If you install Retropie to USB and only boot off the SD, you’ll get less pauses. The rest you pretty much have to go in comparison with the compatibility chart.

I can say for sure that a lot of the PSP minis work just fine, as do the RPG’s like the Y’s series, and that only at 1050Mhz on the Pi 2 for me.

EDIT: Typo on Mhz

[joyrider3774]

yeah i still have to test more but i already noticed once of the hacks (which said speedup) actually decreased performance when i last tested before going to work. Didn’t had time to test other games yet, cause i seem to be having an input problem as well before i left. for some reason one of my button presses on my picade doesn’t register constantly making acceleration in games like ridge racer and toca race driver 2 not work. Don’t know why though but it did work with my joypad hooked up to the pi. I’m not that concerned about it.

1500mhz on a pi 2 isn’t that like a huge overclock ? i have a pi2 as well did not try yet to boot my sd card in the pi2 to see what the diffrence is like.

I might start with a clean config again when i get home and test each setting individually using savestates on for example star ocean 2 in the town after the 1st (little) fight cause that game out of all the ones i tested had the worst performance. Not sure if it’s a good way to go though settings that work for one game might not work for others and certain games have problems with certain hacks like mediëval resurrect with the timing hack as far as i can remember without testing. It locked up on the main menu well just before the main menu appears if i had that enabled. But would need to check again to be sure if that was actually the setting. It was one of the 1st games, besides tekken that i tested.

Also i’m not certain if this could have an impact on performance but i removed the roms/psp folder and made a symblic link for roms/psp to /media/usb0 i’m not certain but i do not think symbolic links could have a performance impact can it ?

i’ll try y’s series as well to see if there’s a diffrence, i noticed ridge racer 2 was running already a lot better then any other game i tried although could not really test due to the input problem and possibly bugs due to hacks / speedups checked (the road / surroundings was all black).

I’ll post again when i tested more games / played more with the settings

[xd3l]

Typo, I meant 1050Mhz.

Why not install the img to usb, then take the boot partition and copy that to an sd, then change the cmdline.txt to point to sda2 instead?

[joyrider3774]

because i’m not certain it will speed things up and i just had everything said up (sd card is full) on my sd card so not willing to do everything again from scratch although i could probably make a new image from the 32gig sd card and use that image to put on my harddisk. Anothear reason is that i had just copied all my psp iso’s to the disk and applying the disk immage to the harddisk means i’ll have to copy them all over again and it did take up to an hour. So before i go that route i want to be sure it would make a diffrence. I just (still) think the pi3 is not capable of running (all / demaninding) games full speed for psp some will work with frameskip some won’t.

I also noticed using htop that the cpu’s were not fully utilised which makes me believe its the graphics part of the pi that can’t handle it

[xd3l]

I’m nearly at the end of Ys Origins Book I, apparently it can handle something. :)

[tboheeren]

My tekken6 experience with lr-PSPPSP on standard raspberrypi3 can be found here:

Still very choppy. Did somebody get significant better results with this game? Perhaps with the settings in this post?

[labelwhore]

[quote=119541]yup running retropie over sd card using samsung evo 32gb class 10 micro sd. My iso’s are on a hard disk.

I don’t know really maybe i’m looking to hard at the fps but fully playable should be running smoothly at 60/60 fps withouth frameskip well that’s fullspeed at least. Pi3 can’t handle that (probably can for certain 2d games) Even frameskip 1-3 is not showing 100% speed in fps counter i can see the percentage going down quite a lot.

So i’m not certain what the problem might be either i’m too focused on the fps counter or others are not ? Later today i’m going to test a few other / older games and see how they perform

[/quote] Playable, to me, has nothing to do with frame count. (unless of course it’s way too low) I’ll turn frame skip on if it needs to be. My requirements for playability are pretty subjective. If the skipping is bad enough it bothers me, I’d consider it unplayable. Generally, I’m looking for around 30 fps or higher, below that becomes untolerable.

[joyrider3774]

tboheeren try ppsspp not lr-ppsspp it’s wee bit faster.

labelwhore yeah i guess it’s subjective, problem is some games seem to start ok but after a while or later in the game’s progress speed crumbles for example with star ocean 2 if you just quickly start everything seems to be running full speed until you can first control your character then you notice the frame drops (a lot) can’t remeber how much but i do remeber the number on the 1st town it was at 12 – 15 fps and i had frameskipt set to 3 and 4 once (which the pi could not held steady) 60/4 = 15 fps 60/3 = 20 fps so 100% at those frameskips so in order i to make it playable i would need to have it set to at least 5 or perhaps 6 to be safe. Which is way to much to my liking frameskip 1 i can live with (constant 30 fps) for 100% speed but even that is not reachable in all games. I do understand though that a lot of it depends on the game and even where you at (progression) in the game.

I might try messing around some more with self building the binaries and trying out perhaps profiling options (if they even work) of gcc / g++ i used those when i ported emulators (not ppsspp but things like sms-sdl gnuboy etc) to the dingoo and canoo in the old days and i do remeber that helped a fair bit 1-3 fps on a system with much lower specs then the pi although i don’t know if it’s actually the cpu or gpu that can’t handle it, my guess is gpu since when i looked at htop not all 4 cores where at 100% actually far from it when running a game

[tboheeren]

With ppsspp my controller stopped working. Had to use the keyboard to enter psp menu and exit to emustation. Is this something common?

[joyrider3774]

you have to press esc and then goto the controller options and (re)assign your controls (specifically for ppsspp)

[g0nz0uk]

That url is great, I’ve spent ages trying to get Wipeout to work and it shows there are issues with low framerate, wish I’d seen this earlier :).

Are there these sort of spreadsheets for other emulators?

[joyrider3774]

btw had to dig up the thread on the arhcive.org since gp32x seems to be down / not exist anymore. I’m talking about these profiling options with gcc / g++ 4.XX

http://web.archive.org/web/20131024163828/http://www.gp32x.com/board/index.php?/topic/28490-advanced-optimization-via-profiling-with-gcc4/

not sure if anyone with a pi ever tried that, it won’t magically run full speed all of a sudden but would be nice if gcc / g++ on the pi supports it to see if it makes a diffrence

[labelwhore]

[quote=119624]

labelwhore yeah i guess it’s subjective, problem is some games seem to start ok but after a while or later in the game’s progress speed crumbles for example with star ocean 2 if you just quickly start everything seems to be running full speed until you can first control your character then you notice the frame drops (a lot) can’t remeber how much but i do remeber the number on the 1st town it was at 12 – 15 fps and i had frameskipt set to 3 and 4 once (which the pi could not held steady) 60/4 = 15 fps 60/3 = 20 fps so 100% at those frameskips so in order i to make it playable i would need to have it set to at least 5 or perhaps 6 to be safe.

[/quote]
From what I’ve read there appears to be a memory leak in PPSSPP (reicast too) that is attributed to the decreasing performance.

[xd3l]

He he he, don’t expect games like Tekken 3 to run. :)

RPG’s and Minis work great through…. most of them!

[joyrider3774]

found some settings that more or less make tekken 6 work although far from perfect. created a little video of it showing the settings as well. I guess it’s more or less playable like this although on certain stages there are slowdowns the one with those fountains / lights.

Sorry for the bad quality it’s done with my Phone and wasn’t easy to film the picade using my Phone

i guess some people want to play it like this.

Street fighter alpha 3 is the only game i came across yet that works full speed without frameskip it’s also in the video a bit

the settings in the video do not really work well for other games though well i’m not sure if it’s the settings or the emulation itselve causing the glitches.

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