[pmurch]

Yeah, trying to figure out the best emu options.

I just really wish there was one mame emu that played everything and allowed per game control configs!

[pmurch]

Ah that’s too bad. Thanks for the help!

[pmurch]

You nailed it. Wrong rom version.
Working great now.

Next question though, is there any way to control overscan in this emu? On my arcade cab’s CRT it isn’t filling the whole screen (by about an inch on each side).

All the other Emu’s are fine tuned just right, so I don’t really want to tweak the config.txt. Anything similar to the “border” config option in mame4all that I can add to gngeorc?

[pmurch]

Not sure… I can take a working metal slug and neogeo.zip from my mame folder and get this result.. Same with any other rom…

Anything to do to diagnose? I updated binaries thru the setup menu too, same result.

[pmurch]

Piped output out to a log, also found the line before says “can’t load <rom>”. Really not sure what’s wrong here.

[pmurch]

I’ve tried that too, same result. Other ideas?

[pmurch]

Does the config menu now grab optimized builds of the emulators then?

[pmurch]

That audio noise is typical for the pi. A lot of places suggest replacing the built in analogue out with a cheapo usb sound card off ebay for around $2-5.

[pmurch]

Did you buy your sd card on eBay? There are a LOT of cards where they mislabel the size and use firmware tricks to fake it to the OS sold on there. This causes odd behaviour like you describe.

[pmurch]

Awesome! I’ll give it a try as soon as I get home tonight.
If you let us know which ones are unoptimized, I will be happy to test the new ones.

[pmurch]

I’d be interested in giving a work in progress version a try too. Any progress?

[pmurch]

Buzz,
One issue using your latest image:
-I seem to be getting a segfault in some games that I believe previously worked in Mame4all… MK2/MK3 for example.

Any debug info I can send you to help figure this out? Do I need a new binary?

[pmurch]

[quote=86604]you can’t just rebuild something to take advantage of multiple cores automatically – it has to be written in a way to support it. Most emulators are single threaded by design. if they have more than one thread, its likely just maybe sound or having rendering split out, so you don’t get 2x performance exactly. Stuff that benefit from multiple cores are applications / compiling / video decoding (where a decoder can decode future frames on multiple cores – ffmpeg / xbmc supports this)), multitasking/desktop apps etc,
I will provide some binaries compiled for the cortex-a8 for testing – they may offer better performance. Some can be rebuilt out of the box, but some like mame4all need the makefile adjusted since its hardcoded for armv6.
[/quote]

No worries. I get that. I’m a software developer :)
I am just envisioning the end of audio skipping if the emus have been written with the ability to split audio off to its own thread.

Thanks!

[pmurch]

Out of curiosity, when more things are rebuilt to take advantage of multi core, will we be able to use the update binary option in retropie setup? Or will we have to re-image?

[pmurch]

Well, I’m married to this display because it’s the one built into the arcade cabinet. I have no doubt another display would be better. That’s sort of the crux of my issue, I need to figure out how to get it working nicely on this one!

[pmurch]

Unfortunately that’s one of the things I tried. Because the image geometry is already misshapen, it essentially just zooms the incorrectly shaped image.

The overscan options referred to there are the ones I have already set in config, but like I said, the addition of that overscan_scale option may be changing mame4all-pi’s expectations of what is being output.

[pmurch]

Nice! Excited to hear more.
If you have a moment. I’m interested in Mame4all-pi performance. Can will it run slow games like the MK series and NBA JAM full speed?

[pmurch]

You may also want to try “apt-get dist-upgrade”

[pmurch]

There’s a post over at raspberrypi.org saying the actual command is “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade”

Give that a try if you previously just ran upgrade. Check /boot to see if you now have kernel7.img. If so, you’re part way there.

The other thing upgrade does is get kernel modules for use on the new processor.

Take a look ad the folder(s) in /lib/modules/ to see what files have change dates of today, then compare to a full raspbian distro if you like, to see what differences there might be.

[pmurch]

Apt-get upgrade shouldn’t add anything back in. Should just get the latest for installed packages. Now if one of the things stripped out is required for compatibility, then we might need to do a little more than that to make it work, despite what has been said elsewhere. Mine isn’t here yet, so I can’t be of much help with the process!

[pmurch]

Np! All the articles out there talking about the pi 2 seem to be missing these very specific statements!

There’s still stuff that could break, but it sounds like there’s a great chance You get a quick bump from the hardware boost, and a much bigger bump in the long run as software gets optimized, without much risk.

[pmurch]

EDIT: Deleted my now unnecessary reply!

[pmurch]

The other revelation in that interview is that it maintains roughly the same level of overclockability, though it will likely need help staying cool whereas the B+ could usually be OC’d without additional cooling.

This is pretty promising for me, as it means we can probably bump to around 1260mhz or so without too much trouble.

I’d be surprised if between the core bump, RAM, OC ceiling, and the potential for multi threaded emus if we don’t see a playable n64 emulator on this new machine, but at the very least, it’s a rock solid $35 MAME machine with tons of room to grow as emus are upgraded to take advantage.

[pmurch]

Registered just to confirm, yes, “apt-get upgrade” is all you’ll need to move from B/B+ to 2B, as per Ebon Upton in this interview at MakeZine:
http://makezine.com/2015/02/02/eben-upton-raspberry-pi-2/.

This will bring down the new ArmV7 compatible kernel, while all the user land ArmV6 code maintains compatibility.

In short, we should be able to upgrade our existing Pi distro, and then freely move between the two. Right now we’ll get clock speed/ram speed boosts (which Ebon estimates at 1.5x in that interview), while later we get whatever multithreaded performance boosts come from re-compiled emulators (Up to 6x I guess?).

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