VBA-M Next Slowness Issue

RetroArch Android devices
#1

Hi all,

I have been heavy into the emulation scene for over a decade, but am new to Retroarch as of a few months ago.

I recently purchased a Galaxy Note 4 and loaded it up with the latest stable release of Retroarch, which I believe is v1.0.0.2. With this version, both the GBA cores were unplayable to me, due to the garbled sound, which seemed to be caused by the emulator not running full speed.

I was able to remedy this by updating Retroarch to the latest GIT version, but not completely.

I have been playing Final Fantasy V on the VBA-M Next core and it works fine for the first five to ten minutes, and then it slows down and has the issue with sound and the video not being smooth. When I exit the game, and it loads up the Retroarch menu, it loads up the menu extremely slow, (also happened with v1.0.0.2) and also seems to impact general performance on my phone, even after I make sure Retroarch is not running at all. I have to shutdown my phone, and power it back on in order for it to perform normally again.

I do not have rewind enabled, or any shaders, and I am not using save states.

I understand that the VBA-M cores are more demanding than the others, but I thought the Galaxy Note 4 would be able to handle them, maybe I’m wrong? It just seems weird that it works fine for about 10 minutes before it goes all weird. Perhaps a memory leak of some sort?

Any help from anyone would be greatly appreciated. Looking forward to v1.1!

  • BennyKurns
#2

You can try a nightly from buildbot.libretro.com and give the gpSP core a shot.

#3

I’ll give that a try today, thank you!

I hope the sound is OK in this version of gpSP. I remember the sound on the PSP version being OK.

I’ve tried using JohnGBA and the sound was so terrible!

I’ll let you know how it goes, thank you!

#4

Unfortunately, it seems as though the nightly builds result in a black screen when loading a ROM with any core.

#5

Did you uninstall the old version before installing the nightly? I think some config stuff may conflict if you don’t.

I also think you need a GBA bios for gpSP but not for VBA-M/Next.

#6

I am now able to get VBA-M Next working.

gpSP still results in a black screen upon loading any ROM however.

I have gba_bios.bin in my GBA ROM folder, is it supposed to be somewhere else?

#7

I was able to get gpSP working by dropping the gba_bios.bin file into the System folder in RetroArch.

I will test and see how it goes.

Thank you so much for your help!

#8

You need game_config.txt in your rom directory too (or system folder).