NES cores available on RPi1 are too slow

steveth45 · 2 November 2019 18:56

I recently installed Lakka on my Raspberry Pi B+. The only NES cores that show up in the menus are FCEUmm and Nestopia. Neither of these runs fast enough. FCEUmm is nearly fast enough if I severely overclock the Pi. Looking around, it seems that the Quicknes core runs faster than these two, and would be ideal for older RPis. I looked into adding it, and this page: https://www.lakka.tv/doc/packaging-a-libretro-core-for-lakka/ links to a list of cores already packaged by Lakka here: https://github.com/libretro/Lakka/tree/lakka/packages/libretro

That list contains Quicknes. Why is Quicknes not available in Lakka on the Raspberry Pi? (I’m using the latest 2.3.1 build).

Followup question: I love the Lakka project and would like to contribute to it, what can I do to make this core available for everyone using Lakka?

metchebe · 1 November 2019 21:07

I agree it should be included.

For now, you can “sideload” it by putting it in /storage/cores.

The build from here should work: http://raw.libretro.com/nightly/linux/armhf/latest/

steveth45 · 2 November 2019 18:56

Thanks! Unfortunately, when I unzip those into /storage/cores, they appear in the menu as available NES cores, but when I try to use them, they don’t load and I just get kicked back to the menu. I tried 3 different cores and they all did the same thing: quicknes, bnes and emux_nes.

steveth45 · 3 November 2019 01:28

I figured out that the quicknes core wasn’t building, so I opened an issue and a pull request to fix: https://github.com/libretro/Lakka-LibreELEC/issues/835

negativeExponent · 6 November 2019 08:30

if you are able to re-compile fceumm for your device, try lowering audio rate to 32000(or 44100) and only use “low sound quality”. this should make core use a much lower 44100-based audio filters which could possibly speed things a bit (but since this is RPi1, dunno)

github.com

libretro/libretro-fceumm/blob/master/src/drivers/libretro/libretro.c#L2104


   struct retro_memory_descriptor descs[64];
   struct retro_memory_map        mmaps;


   if (!game)
      return false;


   /* initialize some of the default variables */
#ifdef GEKKO
   sndsamplerate = 32000;
#else
   sndsamplerate = 48000;
#endif
   sndquality = 0;
   sndvolume = 150;
   swapDuty = 0;


   /* Wii: initialize this or else last variable is passed through
    * when loading another rom causing save state size change. */
   serialize_size = 0;


   PowerNES();

steveth45 · 6 November 2019 17:46

Thanks for the tip, the quicknes core is pretty fast and runs at full speed on my Pi. Overclocked, I can even run it full speed with the crt-pi shader.