If there is someone reading this thread that is currently using the latest version of Retroarch, on a North American Galaxy S4 (Quad core) using this Genuine Samsung MHL 2.0 adapter on a LED/LCD TV/monitor, can you chime in with your experience? If it’s working perfectly for you, without lag or stutter, perhaps we can pick your brain about your setup to see what could be amiss with our setups.
I bought a Samsung Galaxy S4 two days ago (European model - Snapdragon 600).
I see it has no Micro HDMI port - so basically the only way to hook this up to a monitor is through MHL? Might just buy the adapter myself then and see how it fares.
That’s correct, but beware of fake adapters floating around. Check this out first: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2412756
Mine actually came in the smaller older style box that we thought might be Fake. Turns out it most likely isn’t. So unfortunately, you can’t spot a fake by the box alone, it seems. The weight of the adapter itself (without the shield clipped on) and the fact that the phone charges when you plug a charger (sold separately) in seem to be the only way to tell at this moment.
hehe I know you’re not a fan of android from a development standpoint Squarepusher, but I think you’ll like the S4 for everything else… It’s the best phone I’ve ever owned.
UPDATE: I also may have found the resolution to my stuttering issue that started this ugly thread. I thought perhaps, since emulation FPS seems to be somewhat tied to the audio, I tried disabling the audio in Retroarch. I was NO LONGER experiencing any Stutter/Slowdown. So I got a little excited that I might have found the issue and I went back and enabled the audio as well as “Dynamic Rate Control” AND “High latency audio” (So all 3 audio options are checked).
So far I’ve been testing game after game and core after core and have not had it slow down yet. I’ve been testing for about an hour now, where as before, the problem would have started happening anywhere between 5-10mins of play.
Sufficed to say, I’m quite stoked that I can game at full speeds on my 55" TV!
I’ll update here if anything changes - still testing…
Seems like that adapter can’t cope with the normal low audio latency configuration and therefore you have to resort to ‘high audio latency’ (ie. 160ms).
Hmmmm… thanks for the heads up. Will have to tinker with the settings as recommended to see if it makes a difference for my recently acquired a Minix X5 mini and X7.
http://www.minix.com.hk/Products/MINIX-NEOX7.html http://www.minix.com.hk/Products/MINIX-NEO-X5mini.html
Ran into similar screen performance issues with the original Super Mario Bros using Nestopia.
Cave Story runs great! Didn’t get much of a chance to test some of the other systems, but will do so soon.
Much thanks to Squarepusher for all his efforts… would of never stumbled across Cave Story if it wasn’t for RetroArch!
I wonder why it works stutter-free for about 5-10mins first and then starts to slow down.
After further testing last night, my choppiness issues mostly came down to refresh rate it appears (as I later found out is detailed within the in app’s help), and not the high latency option with my HDMI connected Minix X5 Mini.
I initially used the ‘Calibrate Refresh Rate’ option which set a very different rate to the OS-reported rate.
Setting it the OS-rate fixed most/all of my performance issues. In the help it mentions this feature may not report the correct refresh rate for your device, but it appears the report the rate on the Minix via HDMI work perfectly!
Games like Super Mario Kart (SNES9X) now work flawlessly. I did get occasional, but very minor slow down; but this was fixed when the ‘Threaded Video driver’ option is turned ON. Note, I prefer playing with both the ‘Scale Integer’ and ‘Bilinear Filter’ turned OFF.
The only exception to this rule was with fast scrolling games like Super Mario Bros (NEStopia/FCEMuu), Wonderboy [wboy] (Final Burn Alpha) etc, While they still worked well enough, it definitely appeared to scroll smoother when the ‘Threaded Video driver’ was turned OFF for such games.
Games where successfully tested at both 1280x720@60 and 1920x1080@60!
Licker, try recalibrating the refresh rate with the MHL adapter connected and see if it makes any difference for you.
A question for Squarepusher, I gather with the use of static synchronization (as detailed in the help), Double or Triple Buffer options as found in some emulators including MAME are not applicable or beneficial to RetroArch/Libretro? Only ask as I found that always improved the smoothness with games like Wonder Boy in MAME (running on Windows).
EDIT: Oh, and also props to Themaister for all his efforts (and what an awesome face! :P)… and all else involved in this damn fine project!
Hi everyone, I got my new micro HDMI to HDMI cable last night and tried it out and everything works perfectly. I doubt it’s the cable though since it’s identical to the last one I had. The quality of the individual cable could have been a factor though since they both were 15ft and who knows if I had a bad one or something. Anyway I’m more leaning to the other things that have changed since I last tested the HDMI output and was having issues with audio stuttering, dropouts, and choppiness. Firstly, I uninstalled a number of games and apps on my phone (BlackBerry Z10 STL100-1) and freed some space. The Z10 starts to do all sorts of strange things when it’s low on storage. For example, apps crash, camera in particular starts having all sorts of issues. BBM starts to disconnect frequently among other things but the 10.1 OS doesn’t inform the user in a clear enough manner of how critical it is for them to free some space at this point. It does give a warning, however that warning is too mild considering the impact of running out of storage. So that could be a factor which was causing the issues. The other big change I did to my phone is that I updated my OS to a leaked BlackBerry 10.2.0.1047. That’s a major update and brings quite a number of improvements to the BB10 platform, including performance and stability improvements and nice new features like toast notifications as well as updating the Android App compatibility to Android 4.2.2 Jellybean to name a few. I strongly suspect that that is the main factor which solved the issue for me. I can’t conclude without retesting all of the variables, however It’s working now and I’m satisfied and happy. I’m not really in the mood to revert my OS just to see if it was that when I know 10.2 represents the future and an official release is imminent. So that brings me to the point of appealing to you, Squarepusher to stay your hand in implementing some of the features which you thought might have helped solved the issue like enabling threaded video output by default on the BlackBerry 10 port or any other fix or trade off which might introduce more latency or lag as a result. I would still like to see the BlackBerry 10 port continue to improve though. It seems as though it’s started to lag way behind in terms of the user interface, features, cores and updates compared to the Android and iOS versions which I have been able to try. Even the multi touch isn’t working properly as it doesn’t seem to support more than 2 "touches at the same time. That’s a shame though since the emulator performs so well on the Z10 and the BlackBerry 10’s native Wiimote and micro HDMI support as well as easy native file system navigation makes it a very complete and easy to setup platform for the “portable arcade/console” concept. With those stuttering issues fixed I can now say that I have achieved that. Just keep up the work on improving the interface and fixing the bugs. Let me know if I can help in anyway . If it ain’t broke don’t fix it but you can improve it, make it better and more efficient. Thanks a lot for all your great work and you’re welcome to all those who thanked me previously.
Another thing I have personally noticed with my MINIX X5 mini (have yet the test to X7) is that on a cold boot of the device (vs powering from sleep), the reported refresh rate of the device obviously does not match what is actually set as the game play is real choppy.
If I go the the HDMI mode settings (under Android), change the resolution once and then back to what it originally was… loading the game again in RetroArch (without tinkering with the refresh rate settings again) the games play perfectly again with smooth video scrolling and audio!