I sure hope so.
A Windows box is not an option I am willing to entertain, though I do plan to use it as a test bed to see if the Linux drivers are causing any issues. Once I narrow down my issues with GC and PSP, I can push ahead.
Some of my PSP tests might have occurred after my roms got corrupted. All of my tests there are suspect currently, so I have to retest everything.
I could say a lot of things, too, but Iām choosing not to. Because right now, whatās the point?
Yup, I figured it was going to be a possibility of semantics (and respective goals/definitions) with respect to the positions of our arguments. I can respect your position. Itās not one I would hold (and I could crack a joke here about how engineers, comp-scis, physicists and the like see the world, but Iām sure you know that one already).
Right now, the fact is that youāre having trouble getting any PSP title to run, and Iām currently not having that problem. I can run both Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles @ 60 FPS and Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep at 30FPS. Pac-Man Championship Edition runs @ 60FPS. They launch, and run, without any hitches, problems or glitches that I can visibly detect right now without running a debug log and combing through the damn thing. On Lakka. 3DS and Dolphin (Gamecube) emulation right now doesnāt have a problem, and this is with the Intel integrated graphics chip on board. I sincerely donāt think RA/Lakka is the problem here. PSP emulation runs pretty smooth with the most recently integrated core (before, youād have a really good argument with the older PSP cores, they sucked, and that was with the devās own admission).
If youāre not willing to entertain Windows (donāt blame you and if you want a more appliance-like form factor, Windows isnāt going to cut it anyway), Retropie x64 is your only choice (currently as of the time of this writing) if you want PS2 with everything you have listed on Linux. An ideal choice for a Retropie x64-based machine, by their teamās standards, would be an old Alienware Steam Machine (think Alpha, but runs Steam/Debian instead of Windows). i5 or i7 (go with the i5, sweet spot for performance/price/hardware). Youād have a better chance with NVidia-based GPUs for this one. Since the Steam Machine already has built-in Bluetooth and 802.11ac Wi-Fi, youāll be fine with wireless controllers (hell, even the Wii U Pro Controllers work out of the box).
Corrupted ROM/ISO sets can be a huge pain in the ass. Iām suspecting your problem lay there (which more than likely, youāll probably have to grab some new ones or new copies of your good master set).
I wish we had more overlap in titles, because your experience that your games work, and mine that my games do not work, can both be true if our libraries do not overlap. Because of the corruption that I know happened (I donāt know when it started or how long it took to spread to all of the titles), I cannot be certain that any of my tests were valid. I do know that none of my GC titles have any corruption (they all check out, MD5 sum-wise, with Redump hashes). This week I will test again (and more) and try and see if it was an isolated issue or if I can narrow down any issues with PSP emulation.
I say 3DS has bad performance not because of any tests/trials/direct knowledge, just based on the official site/forums where its discussed that even the most high end PCs on the market right now, struggle on most games. I am not sure how up to date that information is (is it pre dynrec or post?), only that I donāt actually expect this to work yet. Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised!
As for GC, I do not have a huge list of titles here, so I plan to try every one and make a list to see what the states are for each title.
The various boxes I am looking at for this have anywhere between 2250 STR and 2350 STR. I am leaning towards the lower end because the machines that have that little bit of extra cost a lot more and have worse form factors. As an example PCSX2 recommends 1800 STR to run most games decently, or 2000 STR for more demanding games like God of War. If these numbers are to be believed (and most of the games are CPU bound in PCSX2, rather than GPU bound), then the range I am looking at should have no problem running them, assuming the drivers are decent.
I fully plan to have investigated more by the end of the week. If it turns out that PS2 is the only thing that is lacking in Lakka, then I am fine with dual booting an Ubuntu Minimal install that goes straight into PCSX2, and using Lakka for everything else.
Very true, but what titles are you testing? I mean Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles on PSP is one thing, God of War: Chains of Olympus is something else entirely.
I have the entire Gamecube library, so Iām pretty sure Iām covered there (I had a Gamecube and my Wii is backwards compatible).
PS2 game-wise, Iām testing God of War 2 and Tekken 5 for my benchmarks. I can run those @ 60 FPS on the Alpha i3. So I know Iām pretty solid there.
Oh yeah, almost forgot, Lakka is based on LibreElec, which also has another build that can do everything RA/Lakka can, incorporates more cores and has PS2 as part of its package (uses Emulationstation as its frontend, so incredibly similar to Retropie/Recalbox). Link here: https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/302-le8-remix-generic-rpi-emulationstation-chrome-spotify-provide-logs-if-problems/?pageNo=1. The developer on the forum, Escalade, did the build himself, and is available for questions. I use it on one of my other HTPCs Iāve got lying around here, but disable the ES frontend (I prefer RA/Lakka).
I looked in to the Alienware Alphas as possible choice, they are a bit bigger in form factor than I would like, but they do have nice GPUs. Which one do you have, the R1 or the R2?
That you have PCSX2 running at full speed on God of War 2, is a pretty good sign, its a pretty demanding game.
I cannot recall all of the PSP titles that I tested, but I can remember three: Dissidia, Dissidia 012, and GripShift. All three of these play fine on my desktop. The latter having a slight graphical glitch on the bottom of the menus, but gets into game and pays OK. I did try FFIII also, and it didnāt work for awhile (it would go black screen after the loading crystal), and then it started working. I am not sure if this is the point when I tried a nightly core though. Again, there could have been corruption involved anywhere along this path so its not entirely accurate until I test again. But if you happen to have these games, I would be interested in knowing your results though Lakka.
I have two R1s. Mainly because, less than $500 nowadays (I got the i3 for less than $200 from Gamestop: https://www.gamestop.com/browse?nav=16k-3-steam+machine,28zu0.). Building something along those lines for less than $200? LOL. I have the i7 and i3. Another beautiful thing about the R1ās: optimized for the i3, and with its high initial internal base clock speed, does well enough for emulation purposes that PS2 emulation isnāt a problem (and Iām going to need it with God of War, Shadow of the Colossus and Twisted Metal: Black).
R2ās have started popping up on Craigās List. But the R1ās are going for $300 or less and thatās for the i5 edition. However, since you mentioned itās a bit bigger than youād like for a form factor (I like SFF PCs as well because I live in a small-ish apartment for now). I can get my hands on those and test them and generate a log or two and comb it over (I know enough from the logs where the problem can be identified from time to time).
That performance is with R1ās? Thats pretty impressive. There seems to be two different models of R1 with i3ās for the R1 (the i3-4130T and the i3-4170T) which had an STR of 1671 and 1828 respectively. If you are getting 60 FPS on GoW2 with either of those, then I am worrying more about PS2 performance than I need to. Thats good news.
As for upgrading to the R2ās, in the CPU area, its not really an upgrade. The i3-6100T has a STR of 1814 (about the same as the i3-4170T) In fact the specs for each of those CPUās are practically identical: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=2639&cmp[]=2624
Next month I plan to buy a new box for this, so I will be doing more research on it around that time. I am not completely against a 7" form factor, but the smaller the better. I want this tiny and out of the way.
The i3 is the 4170-T, and I maxed out the RAM and installed a SSD (all of the PCs in the place have SSDs, donāt leave home without them). The kicker is with PCSX2 is that the 4170-T has a base clock of 2.9 GHz, so Iām well within range of that (I tested other lesser graphically-intense games before I moved onto GoW 2 and Tekken 5 for benchmarking just to get the emulator configured). I have to admit, I didnāt even think PS2 emulation was possible on this thing at full speed @ HD resolution, but it just keeps surprising me with the performance of the little engine that could.
If you really feel the need, you can get away with one of those Dell Optiplex SFF PCs off of CL and insert an old used graphics card and do PS2 emulation. Those usually will run i5 from the 3rd or 2nd gen. More than enough to support PS2 emulation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUHQ-G6Lssk.
So I tried a few more PSP games now that I got most of my collection back un-corrupted.
Dissidia and Dissidia 012 both crash to desktop after the title screen on Lakka (installed on my test box) and RetroArch (installed on my Desktop). Both of these games work perfectly on OpenEMU (which uses roughly the same PPSSPP version as Lakka/RetroArch) and stand alone PPSSPP (both of these installed on my Desktop), so it is pretty clear that these failures have something to do with RetroArch/libretro. @Shockwave do you have either of these titles? What is your experience with them? (Bonus: The same titles also CTD when I run them through that LibreElec build you mentioned, this is to be expected if its using RetroArch under the hood)
In better news, I tried a handful of PSP games that I had not previously tried (Persona 1, 2, & 3, and BoF III) and these worked great so far.
What system/OS/setup are you using for PCSX2?
I installed Ubuntu Minimal, and manually installed PCSX2 on my little test machine, and I was able to play Phantom Brave (one of my favorites) at 60 FPS. I did not play far into the game, or see how it handled more intense scenes (that wasnāt the point of the test), but still, I was surprised that I got a playable frame rate, let alone 60 FPS.
I got my hands on the ISOs and compiled them, and will give them a test when I get home from lunch or after work. Dissisidia Final Fantasy games huh? Iāll also generate a log for Kivutar and gouchi and post it to here so they can see whatās going on.
I would appreciate that. I can get to the title screen on both of them, but after choosing āStartā, it crashes. I am assuming that both of these games use similar engines and are built on the same code base, so they probably both fail for the same reason.
This weekend I will go through my entire list and see if they are outliers, or a common case. If you could verify that they fail in the same way for you, that would be helpful. I am using the USA versions of both, with valid check-sums (Lakka finds them with the ROM scan)
Just curious, I see the initials āCN60ā up in your first post. This wouldnāt happen to be an Asus Chromebox youāre trying this on, would it?
It is. The CN60 is quite the interesting little emulation box. I was able to get PCSX2 to run a few less demanding titles at 60 FPS. Its not quite powerful enough to get full speed GC (it gets roughly 20-30 FPS), and definitely not powerful enough to get any reasonable speeds on the Wii (that gets 15-20), and actual demanding PS2 games (like God of War and SSX Tricky) only get 17-20 FPS during action scenes, but it is a nice little box. I might use it as a media center or a Plex server when I am done using it as a test emulation box.
To be perfectly clear, I am also testing the same games on my high end Desktop with RetroArch. If a title fails in Lakka on the CN60, I try it in RetroArch on the Desktop to see if its an issue with the hardware, or with the cores, and so far, every failure on Lakka on the CN60 can be duplicated on RetroArch on my Desktop.
Donāt bother, it causes a segmentation fault on the core: https://pastebin.com/5Y6UJJ23
@gouchi you might want to look at the log, itās got some weird errors in there for the core itās generating.
Iām going to play around with the settings to see if I can get it to work and comb through the log. Iām sure thereās something in there I saw that could address the overrun.
For thoroughness I installed PPSSPP on the CN60 (in Ubuntu minimal) and it worked fine with those ROMs, although it seems like you are experiencing the same issue on your end too. I appreciate you taking the time to confirm.
Thereās a couple of possibilities I see from the log and some Googling/research:
The occurrence of this fault is nothing new or unique, as it has happened before with a reference to a āfontā when in actuality it was referencing the wrong folder location and it causes the game to crash within Retroarch. Also, there are certain spots within the game itself that not only cause Retroarch-PPSSPP to crash, but also cause the stand-alone version of PPSSPP to crash as well. The log references the fact that it overruns the memory and adjusts the limit of the memory overrun buffer on the fly, which I found weird to do and figured was a precursor of things to come.
When you look closer at the log, I noticed that some of the original encryption blocks from Sonyās old encryption algorithms make an appearance in the log. Not enough to block you from playing the game and you can correct it as part of a CRC check, but you would have to be consciously not having your buffer fill up with other references from not being able to resolve previous frames (which is also in the log as well). The core was having too many unresolved pieces of info and gave the hell up. BOOM! Crash.
The buffer overrun correction was implemented in the stand-alone version of PPSSPP later on but has not been implemented in Retroarch yet (which explains why it works in the stand-alone versions of PPSSPP, but not the RA/Lakka versions). The current version of PPSSPP is 1.5.4 while the Lakka one is 1.4.2 on the 2.1 revision of Lakka. Dissidia is STILL generating problems on PPSSPP in its stand-alone current iteration, so I donāt think youāre out of the woods yet.
Regarding the CN-60 see this: The Shockwave Strikes Back! or "Is he really going to try this again!?!?"
OpenEMU claims to be using version ā1.4.2 + upstream patchā of PPSSPP (they call it 1.4.2.1) and does not get this crash https://github.com/OpenEmu/PPSSPP-Core/releases this might mean that that particular bug was fixed very shortly after 1.4.2 and might be fairly trivial to cherry pick into the libretro core as OpenEMU did.
I have not had much trouble with Lakka 2.1 on the CN60 other than core specific issues, and some minor UI bugs.
Thanks for turning me toward that gamestop link, they are currently ~$167 definitely considering one so that I can have an decent machineā¦, and Iām an AMD guy, but a good deal on an intel/nvidia set is not something turn my nose up at. Getting one of those I would be more willing to give my tk1 jetson to the lakka project.
New link that works is https://m.gamestop.com/product/pc/consoles/alienware-steam-machine-i3-1tb/121862 sorry about the mobile link though.
Check and make sure the local one has them in stock first!