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Full Version: Need help with other emulators and configurations
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Hi,

i'm Sjaaks from the Netherlands. I finally got around to build my Freeplay Zero and i'll be showing my build very soon. I'm also working on a YouTube build video since it's not your typical FPZ build. But more on that, later.

Because right now i'm having some trouble. SNES en NES (let alone GBA) performance is terrible. The NES emulator has some minor stuttering issues but the sound/music is too high pitched for most games. It's way off. The SNES emulator has major visual and audio stuttering issues. I installed the most recent image from this website and i noticed some (at least to me) weird emulators. nestopia? lr-snes9x2002? On my Raspberry Pi 2B i use lr-snes9x2010 and it runs flawlessly, on my Raspi Zero it runs terribly! Bluetooth and Wi-Fi are disabled, because i read in another topic that this influences performance as well.

So, what to do? The default emulators provided with this image perform terribly and i'm wondering if that's normal or do the default emulators work well with your FPZ's? Another question is, if i was to use other emulators, how do i fix my configs? I tried copying the input config of the "GPIO Controller" config to my "snes9x" retroarch.cfg hoping it would pickup the right button mappings but alas.


I really hope someone can help because right now, it's very dissappointing... I at least thought that NES games and SNES games (except for Super FX games and such) would be running very well.

Thank you very much, in advance.
I think that you should have good performance on NES, GBA, and the majority of SNES games.

For NES, I think it should be very straightforward, and it should run just fine.

For GBA, the thing a lot of people miss is that you need the BIOS file to make it work well. Without it, the emulated BIOS will be rather slow (or not work at all). Check out https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Set...oy-Advance for more info on that.

Are you using the Freeplay_Zero_18070601.img.gz image from here?
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folde...nlPS2M4czg
Have you tweaked anything at all, or you only added games?

You could try the Freeplay_Zero_18032101.img.gz image (using RetroPie 4.3). I've heard people having several issues with 4.4 for things.

I have heard of people having issues with their Pi Zero itself. I don't want to jump to that conclusion, because I think it's rare, but if you had another you could easily try, I'd recommend it.

How's the soldering on the Pi Zero? Is there any chance that anything is bridged or not soldered well. In some instances, that could cause issues.

Those are my ideas for the moment.
Hi, thank you for replying on short notice!

GBA emulation doesn't concern me too much, but i'll look into it, thank you.

Actually, i did manage to improve the performance a bit by overclocking the Pi Zero W. Nothing out of the ordinary really (arm_freq 1000, core_freq 500, gpu_freq 500, over_voltage 2), but it did improve on SNES emulation, but honestly it's not satisfying yet. Still a lot of audio hick-ups and visual stuttering at times. The NES emulation remains the same, not too bad, but high pitched audio, or rather sped up gameplay is still unaltered. Gathering some more info i found out the Pi Zero runs an older cpu than the Pi2 and Pi3, therefore in general needing other emulators in many cases, i don't know if that's right. But maybe the differences, like the ones i experience in NES emulation opposed to my Pi2, is caused by the difference in CPU?

I'll see if i can tweak some more and get some performance gain by doing so. If not, i'll look into the other image. Maybe my expectations were a bit too high coming from a Pi2/Pi3 retropie platform which runs amazingly well...  Confused

Thank you again, for replying.  Smile