Update to 32 now or wait?

SRGilbert

Fairly new to Batocera but have really enjoyed running it on a Dell Optiplex 7010 with a GT 1030 so far.

I’m curious as to if it’s standard procedure to just go ahead and update when a new version comes out or do most people hold off and see? Right now it runs fine on 31, so I hate to break what works. 😀

joinski

SRGilbert

if something “breaks” you can easily downgrade to the previous version. but i would recommend to always have a backup (just in case)

SRGilbert

joinski

Thanks! Can you point me to the instructions on how downgrade if needed?

Also, I’ve seen the menu option to do a backup, but it’s not clear to me what exactly it is backing up and how to restore FROM a backup.

joinski

SRGilbert

i never used the backup function, so i don’t know what exactly it does and how it works, sorry.

but we have a very good wiki (thanks to the user Atari 👍)

https://wiki.batocera.org/

here information about upgrade/downgrade procedure: https://wiki.batocera.org/upgrade_manually

SRGilbert

Looks like my concerns were justified.

I couldn’t get the backup function to work. It looked like it might at first but I used a drive that was too small (I didn’t know it would back up all the roms as well) and it errored out. Tried again on two much larger drives and it immediately errors out. Gave that up and just copied the SHARE folder, hopefully that’s enough.

Anyway, update seemed to go okay at first but first thing I noticed was it’s doing that thing where it’s not selecting my Nvidia HDMI for the sound by default but instead tries to play the audio from the motherboard speaker and defaults to this on reboot. 😡 It’s not even giving me the same option of HDMI0 that it used to.

The next thing I noticed is many of my Dreamcast games are not working correctly. Game saves won’t load properly for one thing. 😡

I guess I’ll be looking into figuring out how to downgrade back to 31 for now.

joinski

SRGilbert

We switched to a new audio backend (PipeWire) in v32. You now have to select the proper Audio Profile (Option directly below Audio Output). If you choose the correct combination of Audio Profile and Output, it should stay upon reboots (at least for me it always stayed this way and audio via HDMI is working consistent).

Regading dreamcast… did you check, which emulator/core was used before and which one is now the default? Maybe just changing to the same Emulator/Core you used before will help? I would give all different Dreamcast Emulator/Cores a try.

Are there any more problems/issues you have faced after updating to v32?

SRGilbert

joinski Ok, I think I have the audio sort of figured out but all the options were confusing me I guess. My pc is connected to my Onkyo receiver and I have a 7.1 set up. I kept trying to set it for 7.1, which did work and actually sent the proper audio flag to the receiver, but on reboot it would go back to the internal pc speaker. The only setting that would persist is HDMI Stereo. I mean, I guess that should be fine as 90% of the games I play are either mono or stereo, and systems like Gamecube and N64 do surround with Dolby Pro-Logic, so it should be fine. Still don’t understand why it gives options that appear to work but they won’t stick. 🤷🏼‍♂️

I’ll have to play around with Dreamcast more tomorrow and see what I can figure out. I didn’t keep track of what DC games were using which emulator, I was just trying to load up games from the save states thumbnails and it just went black and I had to hard reboot.

Recce

I believe some new emulator builds may not support game saves from older versions so it’s best to just use an old build that works for you and not updating it unless there are serious issues that bothered you.

Also, if you want to try out newer builds, just get a cheap 8/16GB USB drive and flash into it, this way if there’s issue you can just use back the USB drive with previous build. That is now I manage it, my Batocera OS is on a 16GB drive and game files on a 1TB SSD so I get to try out new builds on separate USB drives without affecting current build.