Raspberry Pi

***Shonumi*** · (This post was last modified: 08-10-2012, 06:07 PM by Shonumi.)

Well, I've had my RPi for a couple of days now. Half of the past four days have been spent obtaining software. Had to hook up my laptop to the RPi to do a network install of Slackware (took 3 hours) and then I compiled Mednafen from source (took 6+ hours o_O). Now my RPi is a gaming machine, almost.

I can't get Mednafen to work on the console. My laptop does it just fine, but I've wasted an entire day trying to do the same with my RPi. So I'm running X, even though I said I wouldn't Dodgy

whatever. Mednafen runs with X, but it's just like others have reported, i.e. slow for some things. Here's what I've tested so far. I used SDL to do the rendering; haven't tried sound at all yet, so if I mention that something is perfect, I'm talking speed-wise. Frame-skipping was disabled as well, just to see how well the RPi could play.

NES - Played a bit of SMB3. On stock clocks, the game is acceptable. Plays perfectly once OC'ed to 900MHz.

GB/GBC - Perfect at stock clocks, runs smoother at 900MHz. Played with Metroid II and Star Ocean: Blue Sphere.

GameGear - Perfect at stock clocks, tried Sonic The Hedgehog and it was very fast.

Genesis - Got less than half speed with Sonic The Hedgehog, OCing the CPU made no difference.

SNES - I was able to enjoy a nice slideshow of Super Metroid. Not playable.

Wonderswan - Yes, there are a couple of games for this handheld that I want to emulate Big Grin

Rockman and Forte was kinda slow at stock speeds. At 900MHz, it's still slower than fullspeed, but not by too much, so it was quite playable.

The speeds will probably improve once drivers come out to accelerate X. It took up as much as 25% of CPU usage when I OCed. So, the RPi doesn't do so hot for emulation right now. That'll change in a bit, I'm sure. Still, I'm pretty happy having come this far. Just learned a bit more about ARM CPUs. Apparently, the CPU is pretty weak as far as ARM chips go. Given that I feel pretty good. I'll post screenshots in the morning.

**delroth** · 08-10-2012, 11:35 PM **#22**

Received my Gooseberry 2 days ago, waiting for the cables to arrive. Should probably be a lot faster than the RPi Smile

**AnyOldName3** · 08-11-2012, 01:15 AM **#23**

Oh, excellent. Now there's an alternative, and that means I'll either get neither or both.

***Shonumi*** · 08-11-2012, 06:28 AM **#24**

Hey delroth, nice purchase Smile

Did some reading up on the Gooseberry and its specs are impressive. I guess for decent emulation, hardware accelerated or pure software, the minimum would be something like a Cortex-A8, which is roughly twice as powerful as the RPi's ARM chip, clock for clock. Well, the RPi is a "learning tool" after all, and it's already taught me something about ARM microprocessors. If I can't use this for emulation, it's at least a good excuse for trying out OpenGL ES and making homebrew.

For the record, just tried with sound. The sound drivers that come with the RPi are beta and buggy. Game Boy and Game Gear games run fine with sound, but Game Boy games tend to freeze X, so I have to jump back to the command-line and restart the X server. They play fine with no sound. NES games lag with sound, but play fine without it.

Been looking at alternatives too, and there are a lot. The DIY computer board market seems to be expanding recently, and good thing for all the tinkerers out there. Here are some of the notable ones:

Hackberry - This one seems very comparable to the Gooseberry, in price and specs. I think I'll get this board next when it comes out.

Pandaboard - This one's been out for a bit and is pretty popular. No official Linux distros though, bit pricey too.

BeagleBoard xM - Looks very capable, but it's rarely sold anymore. The Beaglebone might be a better deal if you can find one.

Mele A100 - Looks cool, price is nice, and you get a case with it. Looks just as capable as the Gooseberry and Hackberry.

ODROID-X - This is one rules them all. Specs are crazy for a board that size. This is gonna be my birthday/Christmas item. If that board doesn't run anything Mednafen throws at it, nothing will (yet).

As promised, pics as attachments. Just some unboxing pics, one of the RPi running, and another of SMB3 on my TV. The RPi is as small as they say, about the size of a credit card or deck of cards. I'm not posting my credit card online Dodgy

and I don't have any cards other than Pokemon.

**delroth** · 08-11-2012, 10:19 PM **#25**

You forgot the Snowball. About as powerful as ODROID-X but was released 1-2 years ago Tongue

**AnyOldName3** · 08-11-2012, 10:58 PM **#26**

The awkward moment when these are probably more powerful than my family's main desktop rig.

**NaturalViolence** · (This post was last modified: 08-12-2012, 05:46 AM by NaturalViolence.)

Quote:The awkward moment when these are probably more powerful than my family's main desktop rig.

I doubt it. I have found that people grossly overestimate how powerful modern arm cpus and SoC IGPs are.

A pentium IV/athlon 64 will still kick the living shit out of any top of the line dual core arm cortex-A9.

@Shonumi

What about the arduino family?

**AnyOldName3** · 08-12-2012, 06:27 AM **#28**

I was aware that I was exaggerating.

***Shonumi*** · (This post was last modified: 08-12-2012, 06:59 AM by Shonumi.)

@delroth - Can't forget to about something I never knew about Wink

First time I've seen the Snowball. The specs are pretty good, but the price is pretty steep for hobbyist projects. It's $300+ for me in the US. For that amount of money, I could just gut a cheap netbook, make a custom case, and call it a day. The ODROIDX is less than half the price with twice the cores. Though the DIY computer boards today are a lot cheaper now than 1-2 years ago. Just look at the PandaBoard and BeagleBoard xM compared to the Gooseberry and Hackberry.

Do tell us how your Gooseberry handles, by the way. It looks like a very intersting piece of hardware. What do you plan to do with it?

@NV - Yeah, my old laptop (it's dead now, so I can't get exact specs atm, pulling from memory) with a Pentium 3 @ 600 MHz and 256 MB of RAM would probably run circles around my RPi. That laptop could run XP (after a 5 min boot sequence :/ ) and all of my old emulators (SNES9x, Gens+, FCEUX, VBA).

I've seen the Arduino boards and I've even read a number of tutorials for it. Unfortunately, I'm not much into hardware hacking. I want something that is capable of running emulators so I can build my own home "console". I can make the case myself and I can do all of the software. I just don't have a big interest in programming hardware or messing around with wires and transistors. I don't even know if the Arduino boards are capable of running a Linux OS either.

**NaturalViolence** · (This post was last modified: 08-12-2012, 08:07 AM by NaturalViolence.)

Well you mentioned the:

Quote:The DIY computer board market

Which the arduino is definitely at the top of. But what you're describing now doesn't fit that previous description. You seem to be building an HTPC, a custom HTPC but an HTPC none the less.

Arduinos are more for DIY engineering. They have only a few MB of memory and an extremely weak microprocessor that is basically the equivalent of a PC microprocessors from the mid 1980s. They also lack any sort of standard video/audio output. This is because they are not designing to be a PC replacement, they are designing to control some type of machine that you're building.

I find it odd that you would use something this weak for an emulation console. Especially considering the much better emulation support that x86 gets over ARM and the number of cheap atom, bobcat, ion, and sandy bridge ULV mini-ITX motherboards/cpu combos out there.