Best portable 2600 so far

[+SvOlli]

Just a short note, that I've encountered the best portable 2600 system so far this weekend.

A Raspberry Pi Zero (W) build in a Retroflag GPi Game running batocera.linux. It just feels like a GameBoy with games I like more. The emulator box I thought I'd never get.

I would have never expected to see my demos run smoothly on a Pi zero. (Mame runs also fast enough for Donkey Kong, Galaga and alike.)

Startup-time is ~45 seconds, but after that it runs like a charm.

There are two changes I've made to my setup one for buttons and one for the theme. If there are people interested, I'll include them here.

[+Andrew Davie]

I want.  Is this running stella?

[+Andrew Davie]

I get a 404 on the linux link

 

[hizzy]

Any video of a running system? How does the screen look?

[+SvOlli]

2 hours ago, Andrew Davie said:

I want.  Is this running stella?

It is running RetroArch with a Stella core. Can't say which version, but everything I threw at it worked (original games and scene demos). If you send test cases, I'll run them for you. I don't think the hardware would cope will with a "native Stella". The display is 320x240 pixels only, so the debugger is out of question. On (my) PAL demos there are a few "line skips", since the typical 256 lines are more than the display can show.

 

2 hours ago, Andrew Davie said:

I get a 404 on the linux link

 

Me too now, it seems to be an DNS error "on their side". If this keeps up, I can provide the image I downloaded. The source code is still available, so I'm not worried.

 

2 hours ago, hizzy said:

Any video of a running system? How does the screen look?

If search for "gpi game" on YouTube, you'll find quite some product reviews. I don't think that there are any 2600 specific ones, but I was very surprised that all 2600 stuff I tried so far worked like I would have expected from a Pi 3 running Stella on Raspbian. I'm still puzzled how they managed to squeeze such a performance out of that small Pi 0.

[+stephena]

2 hours ago, SvOlli said:

It is running RetroArch with a Stella core. Can't say which version, but everything I threw at it worked (original games and scene demos). If you send test cases, I'll run them for you. I don't think the hardware would cope will with a "native Stella". The display is 320x240 pixels only, so the debugger is out of question. On (my) PAL demos there are a few "line skips", since the typical 256 lines are more than the display can show.

Try playing the 'Meltdown' demo.  If the spheres aren't drawn correctly, then it's Stella 4 or less.  Then try E.T.  If the sounds are harsh during the landing screen, then it's Stella 5 or less.  Otherwise it's Stella 6.

[+SvOlli]

The sourcecode being used for building is this:
https://github.com/libretro/stella2014-libretro/commit/a181878b283fc02c26c0474c41bde418c052c853

Version.hxx states:
#define STELLA_VERSION "3.9.3"

So this explains at least a part of the performance...

 

Edit: htop show a total system CPU usage of 51%-56% running "Ataventure", "Bang!" and "2K Is No Limit (PAL)". About 8% of this is not used by retroarch. So there are resources left.

Edited October 28, 2019 by SvOlli

[+stephena]

If this is using RetroArch, try the 'stella' core (note that stella2014 is the old 3.x version, while stella is the 6.1-beta version).  At least you'll see if it can run.  If will definitely use more resources, though.

[+SvOlli]

This will take a bit of work, as for Batocera "Stella" is stella2014 only, I didn't find and other libretro-stella.

Edit: but I'll be on it.

Edited October 29, 2019 by SvOlli

[+SvOlli]

So, I ran a test with the current beta of 6.1 and there the Pi Zero will only run at about 80-90% of "real time speed" most of the time. At light effects even 100% are possible. I'm not sure on how much potential there is for speeding up the code, but it might be doable. For now, 3.9.3 works for me. If you want to do more heavy lifting this might be worth a try: https://www.waveshare.com/gamepi43-us.htm. I have it running as well, but could not find the optimal distro for this yet. Configuring the buttons is more annoying for MAME games and is bigger / more "clumsy". But it has a better display, joypad ("steering cross") and a much faster Raspberry Pi 3 under the hood.

[+SvOlli]

I did another test this weekend. Recalbox also runs Atari 2600 ROMs as well, when the emulation engine is selected as "stella2014" (a.k.a. 3.9.3). The default is "stella" which is a current version and needs something like 120% of CPU power to run without problems.

I also did some research on replacing the Raspberry Pi Zero with a Banana Pi Zero, which should have enough performance to run the current Stella as well. But unfortunately, it lacks the ability to generate an RGB signal using the GPIOs (and audio as well) which is the way the GPi Game gets the data.

[+Andrew Davie]

You'd only need to overclock the zero just a little bit to get to 100%. Maybe that's do-able?

 

[eegad]

On 10/27/2019 at 10:44 AM, SvOlli said:

Just a short note, that I've encountered the best portable 2600 system so far this weekend.

A Raspberry Pi Zero (W) build in a Retroflag GPi Game running batocera.linux. It just feels like a GameBoy with games I like more. The emulator box I thought I'd never get.

For the past few years I've been trying to find a retro gaming handheld that will play early mame games (pacman,  donkey kong,  etc....don't care about any games later than 1984/1985), and also 2600 games. Sounds like your device fits the bill.  The thing is though,  I don't  want to have to build a device.  Nor do I want to install and setup the OS / interface.  What I've been hoping to someday find is a ready-to-go device that I can open the box,  either connect via usb to pc and drag roms onto it (or put roms on an sd card and just plug it in),  and then be able to play. 

 

Do you know of anyone making one like this? Googling retro handhelds turns up various devices but most of them either seem geared towards nes,  snes,  genesis, playstation,  etc.  Or finding out any real info about the device (english instructions)  is impossible.   I just want early arcade and 2600 in a works-out-of-the-box device (minus roms of course.... Though in the case of mame I'd want to know what version of roms the device needs). 

 

[+SvOlli]

In this case, first thing I would try is to look on ebay if someone is selling an assembled kit. It took me less than five minutes to find one with a 32G card and "2000 games preinstalled".