Flickering on Goldeneye 007 (multi-player)

Actnash

Hi, this is my first post. I’m putting together a retro gaming raspberry pi for one of my friends (raspberry pi 4, 4g) and have been setting up batocera V31 for the last few days. Everything is running great so far, but today I was testing goldeneye 007 in multi player mode and noticed that there is a white flickering happening around the border of the bottom screen. The game runs perfect on 1 player. I’m using mupen64plus with glide64mk2. I searched around some other forums and found that this has something to do with frame buffer emulation and that the flickering can be fixed if this setting is disabled. I went into the mupen64 config file and found multiple frame buffer settings, but nothing that said “frame buffer emulation.” It would be much appreciated if someone could help me out with this because I really don’t know what I’m doing. Thanks in advance.

Actnash

In case anyone is having this same issue, I ended up downloading android 11 for raspberry pi 4 (konstakang) and was able to make the correct adjustments to the game in muper64plus FZ to enable multiplayer without the flickering. Plays full speed and looks beautiful overclocked at 2ghz! I saw a few youtube videos claiming that n64 works best on Android for raspberry pi and they were right. PPSSPP is also supposed to play much better. I’m considering keeping batocera for the lower end emulation and using a separate card with the Android OS for N64,PSP,etc… kodi also works great with no hassle on the konstakang android tv 11.

Atari

Actnash This is true, Android can actually utilise Vulkan as well which gives dramatic improvements to the performance of 3D systems.

But Batocera looks nicer and more consistent for the game collection menus.

Pick your poison.

If you use the RetroArch version, you might be able to find the option in its quick menu (hotkey + south button). Then you could discover what the setting line is in retroarch.cfg and implement that into batocera.conf. https://wiki.batocera.org/advanced_retroarch_settings

Actnash

Atari I would’ve actually preferred to use the retroarch version because I like all of the options and shaders, but Mupen with glidemk2 was the only one I was able to get to run 007 at full speed. I’ve used retroarch for years and I’m really familiar with the layout but I’ve been using it mainly on PC. I’m pretty new to the raspberry pi and Linux (I’m not much of a computer guy and anything that has to do with command lines I’ve just had to watch YouTubes or google instructions). Been struggling bc it seems the second that I fix one thing, there is something else that pops up to fix. Like I said earlier, I love batocera and I went through multiple OS’s, and this was by far the most user friendly and I also love how everything looks. I do have to say though, that it was a relief to download konstakang and not have to fool around with config files and altering command lines. It was so easy to overclock, set tv resolution, add games from usb, and other things that can be somewhat tedious to someone who doesn’t know what they are doing like me.

Actnash

Atari So I just realized that you are saying I should try to find the option in the libretro core to turn off frame buffer emulation and copy/paste the command from that core to the mupen glidemk2 core in .config? Great idea. I’ll try it out after I get home from work today, although I’m not certain that the libretro core has this option.

joinski

Actnash I would’ve actually preferred to use the retroarch version because I like all of the options and shaders, but Mupen with glidemk2 was the only one I was able to get to run 007 at full speed.

you can set different emulator/core per game by long pressing the south-button (B on SNES style pad) and then go to Advanced Game Options

Actnash

joinski Yeah, I’m aware. I was able to get Mario 64 to work with the libretro core but I tried super smash bros which would only work with glidemk2 (and was really slow and glitchy at the beginning/player select menu, but ran decently during gameplay) and yoshi’s story which wouldn’t run at full speed with any of the cores. There were a few posts that I read on this forum that after switching to 64 bit, n64 isn’t running as well as in the past but I haven’t tried the 32 but version of batocera. 007 on batocera ran about the same as the Android core, but I was just unable to find a way to turn off frame buffer emulation with batocera where on Android mupen64pkus fz I was simply able to just go into the core settings and unclick it. I think it would be really helpful if the mupen with glidemk2 had an option in advanced settings to easily turn this on and off, because I’ve heard there are some other N64 games that need this as a solution to run properly.

Actnash

So I finally got around to checking the other cores and both of the other ones have the option to turn frame buffer emulation off, but the glide-mk2 core doesn’t seem to have this option. The problem with this is that glide-mk2 is the only core that will run this game at full speed. I would like to request that the developers make this an option in the next version of batocera, if possible because it would be awesome to play multiplayer goldeneye at full speed! Sadly going to have to use 2 cards and play n64 games on Android’s mupen64plus fz when it would be a lot more convenient and fun just to have everything on batocera.

Also, I saw a lot of options that had to do with frame buffer under the mupen config txt file. Is it possible that the frame buffer emulation option has a different name and I’m just being ignorant?

Atari

Actnash That is up to the developer of that video plugin for the libretro/mupen64plus core, which is unrelated to Batocera.

Unless you’re talking about the standalone version of Mupen64Plus, which is unrelated to its Libretro core version. Which one is it, specifically?

Actnash

The glide-mk2 core is stand alone mupen and it is the one missing the option to turn off frame buffer emulation. The libretro core has the option to turn it off in the GUI and the other stand alone mupen64plus core (gliden64) has the option in the config file. I tried copying and pasting the Config command to turn it off into the glide-mk2 config section (it was something like EnableFBEmulation=False) but it did nothing.

Actnash

To be more clear, there are 3 n64 cores total on batocera v31.

Mupen64plus (libretro) - can enable/disable fbe

Mupen64plus stand-alone - glidemk-2 - missing option to disable fbe, but is the only core that will run some of the n64 games at full speed, including 007. Many options in config txt for various things related to “frame buffer” but nothing specifically for frame buffer emulation.

Mupen64plus stand-alone - gliden64 - has the option to disable fbe in config txt

I tried messing around with some of the other frame buffer settings in the config txt for the glide-mk2 plugin, thinking that maybe it could be named something different, but none of the changes made any difference.

Atari

I’ve gone and written up your findings as an issue on the Github: https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera.linux/issues/4650 Hopefully this can be looked into properly now.

Actnash

Atari thanks a lot! I appreciate it.