RetroPie 4.6 brings forth an answer to 'What do I do with this Pi 4 I bought last year?' Bought a Raspberry Pi 4 and left the poor thing mouldering in your gadget drawer? We have news – RetroPie has unleashed version 4.6 of its popular emulator suite. For those of a certain age, the Raspberry Pi has become an essential part in recreating that whole retro-arcade feel. Rather than a full-on PC, the diminutive …
There's a ThinkPad Butterfly with a deceased mobo waiting for sufficient Round Tuits to be turned into a ButterPi. I figured that I'd need some flavour of ATMega to sit between the keyboard and clitmouse and the Pi. I'd also have to replace the screen with one that the Pi would be able to drive without additional conversion, so probably a HDMI or DSI panel which would result in a 16:10 or 16:9 screen ratio, not the original 4:3. Upside would be built-in wired and wireless networking, USB2 and 3, and a fscking lot of space for batteries.
Wouldn't the proof of the pudding* be how well RetroPie 4.6 can emulate the N64 and the GameCube on the Pi 4.
As for the Spectrum ROM I guess you would have to turn off any hooks the emulator has to e.g. speed up tape loading because it's a non-standard ROM and stuff is in different places.
This is Dolphin on the Pi 4. Given that there's still no official build for the Pi 4, I think the most Gamecube games known to work on Dolphin could work on the Pi 4 if they decided to put development effort in that area.
As for the N64, again it's a work in progress but this is Lakka and this is Batocera so I can't imagine RetroPie is that far behind. But yes, N64 emulation is a mess.
I can understand them using a Z80A as the basis for the Ace as the designers had previous worked on various Sinclair ZX development and I believe the external expansion was designed to be Sinclair compatible, but I would have loved to see a 6809 based 8-bit Forth machine - the dual stacks (system and user) would have made it a natural choice for implementing the language.
I've had one set up with a Display O Tron 3000 since the beginning of lockdown monitoring my various clients VPN infrastructure and keeping an eye on servers. Once you figure out how to cool it, it's an exceptional piece of kit.
I booted it up and connected to 6 VPNs at the beginning of lockdown and it's remained connected and alive ever since.
It hasn't required a reboot, the VPNs have never dropped and it reliably provides me with a report each morning.
For those interested in its functionality, it performs a network scan 4 times an hour using masscan on each subnet checking for servers with specific ports open.
The results are piped to a script and parsed to JSON and sent to another Pi (3 B+) running MongoDB with a basic API that I built as it's interface.
While this is happening a banner grab is done to make sure the various services are responding as expected, followed by a PHP script that performs an HTTP/HTTPS status check across the web farms In look after...basically if code 200 then awesome! Else make a note.
A script then fires on the Pi4 to analyse the results and an MD formatted report is pinged to me via PushBullet daily (or immediately if there is something I need to check).
A finally script is fired to check the backup logs once a day (roughly 30 minutes after the backup is known to have finished). The XML logs are parsed and the PASS/FAIL result is sent to the Mongo Pi.
The display o Tron is used specifically for its RGB capabilities...a visual cue...if green then everything is fine, if yellow something is a bit weird, if read summat be dead.
Also, the Pi is broadcasting several WiFi SSIDs, each one linked to a specific clients VPN tunnel, so I can connect any device and be able to SSH where I want without having to have a VPN connection set up on my devices.
There are other scripts (for monitoring UPS backups etc) and other things involved but I think you guys will get the gist.
I have a clone of the whole setup as a cold spare in case there is a problem (hardware failure) with the setup itself.
I've so got a lightweight version as a Pi Zero W dongle (with a 3G/4G modem) that I can plug into the USB socket in my car and give me a quick status read out on a little 128x128 LCD.
This is stripped back and literally just checks that everything is running. No logging occurs.
So yeah, to say that the Pi 4 has thus far had no use is a bit disingenuous.
+1 for effort. Got my 4B about a month ago. Loaded lots of software, and it worked great until I tried to plug an audio DAC on, which is what I got it for. It now pretty consistently fails to boot.
So, it's mouldering in a drawer, while I try to find the time to (a) work out what the power management firmware updates are all about, or (b) send it back during lockdown and hope for the best.
And there was me just sticking mine in a sandwich box in the garden to take videos of the Hedgehogs visiting the feeding station. The 2nd one (the 4gb) was being used as a laptop replacement when staying in hotels.
Then again my Pi B+ has been working quite happily as an arcade machine for ages.
That sounds very impressive, and a truly excellent use of the Pi (purists may disagree and think that the Pi should be used for educational purposes only, but that's not my view).
I have to cheekily ask... Have your scripts on GitHub or similar for us lazy admins to get some inspiration from?
Enjoy, it's clearly well earned ----------------------------------------------------------->
I've tried this, but emulation on a Raspberry Pi device doesn't feel like stepping back in time to the 80s and 90s and playing the classic games I remember and loved growing up, it feels like stepping back to the early 2000s and reliving the frustration of playing badly emulated versions of those games.
The gulf in quality between the software available on the PC and the software available on these things, especially for MAME & other arcade material is too wide for the experience to be rewarding, I'm playing through games encountering bugs I'd forgotten were even present in the crusty old emulator versions being peddled here.
As someone who has built both PC and Pi versions of arcade cabinets, I do understand what you mean. HOWEVER, I don't think that is really the case for most games any longer. What I have running on my current Pi 3 build works flawlessly. And I don't have to rebuild it every other month like my original DOS PC or annually like the later Windows PC edition. My Pi 3 build has been rock solid from day one to day now. Yes, there are some games that don't work well and a few not at all but, considering how old a ROM set I'm working with, I'm actually pleasantly surprised at how few that turns out to be.
As someone who has been twating about with MAME since it first appeared, RetroPie reminds me of why I stopped doing it.
My Pi 4 is a an extaoridnarily capable Kodi machine, and the bundled game emlation software in that setup provides all the segfaults I need to keep me happy.
In 1985 I was trained in Computer Aided Design, multilevel circuit boards on a Mentor Graphics Unix system with massive 19" screens. The upside was it came installed with Battlezone, the classic 3D wire arcade tank battle game. I also had sex for the first time that year. Sex was better but I was definitely better at Battlezone. Both experiences made me appreciate 3D over 2D and I would pay to emulate either of them. I pity today's youth who have never felt a sturdy joystick in their hand.
Oh, I suspect that around half of today's youth have felt a sturdy joystick in their hand, for sure...
Probably mostly similar for the other half, too, although they may have been playing with someone else's joystick...
Except for ones that preferred playing with slot machines...
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