Retroarch Wii vs Retro Pie?

RetroArch Nintendo consoles
#1

Would anyone with experience with both be interested in comparing and contrasting them for me? Is there any clear winner (more specifically when it comes to NES, SNES, Genesis, and SMS emulation)? I’m pretty happy with my Wii, but it is getting on in age. Plus, controlling the entire system with one controller (and not a giant wiimote as a dongle for my CCP) is pretty cool.

#2

In lieu of the previous questions, could anyone tell me how well NES, SNES, Genesis, and SMS emulation play in general on the Pi? Does it run fullspeed like it does on the Wii? Thanks.

#3

I believe SNES and Genesis are sub-60 fps on it. I haven’t tried it personally, though, so if this is incorrect, anyone with more experience is welcome to chime in.

#4

I have a Raspberry Pi

NES - Runs just fine SNES - Has trouble with Super FX games like Star Fox and Yoshi’s Island (maybe others too) Genesis - Genplus-GX runs a bit slow. DGen gives decent performance, but it has issues with some games SMS - Haven’t tried

I used to own a Wii too and I remember it being much better for emulation.

#5

Thanks for the informaion, Steev. Looks like I’ll be sticking with the Wii for now. Maybe the Pi’ll be worth investing in if and when a new version comes out or once the software gets a little more optimized.

I’ll be looking forward to seeing how well the Ouya and Gamestick handle emulation. From what Squarepusher has said earlier, though, it may not be worth my time.

#6

Haven’t used Pii, was very impressed by Retroarch on Wii, IIRC it ran all nes, snes, genesis, SMS, pc engine games at full speed

#7

Update on Genesis/Master system emulation:

I just tried the new Picodrive core on my Raspberry Pi. It has no problem running Genesis and Master System games at full speed.

32X games did not run full speed, however.

#8

It might be that you’re not yet compiling it in with full ARM support. It will most likely fall back on the interpreter MAME SH2 core then for 32X - which would be very slow on your Pi. The ARM dynarec instead would be a lot faster.

I will look at making a generic arm target for it. You’d then have to compile it with -

make -f Makefile.libretro platform=armv6

I’ll rename the existing arm target to armv7 then.

EDIT: Done. Worth a shot.

#9

Thanks.

I compiled with the armv6 target. Raspbian uses hard-float ABI, so I had to set -mfloat-abi=hard in the CFLAGS. Seems faster, but still not full speed. I guess 32X is just too much for the Pi to handle.