General question about poor performance on Pi3B+

skykid

RESOLVED. Thread now here for posterity.

SUMMARY: BUY THE RIGHT GODDAMN (OFFICIAL PI!) CPU (and be careful when downgrading via ssh. It’s not guaranteed to work out exactly as you expect. Always back up your card beforehand).

I’ve just started with Batocera and on my Pi4 everything seems to run fine with few exceptions. But I have a few old 3B+ Pis knocking around and decided to install Batocera on one. Performance seems to be an issue on a number of titles, particularly arcade. Since I keep coming across issues so regularly, and since I can’t seem to find people with the same issues on google, I just wanted to pick the forum’s knowledgable brains on this to find out whether:

My Pi unit has an issue
My PSU is damaged (I’ve occasionally seen low power warnings and I’m not sure if this is contributing factor, even though it’s a 5V PSU for the Pi specifically with its own power switch on the cord).

These are just a few I’ve noted that I’ve experienced problems with. There are others, and these are all early tests, hence I’m worried about performance across the board:

SNES:

Starfox - runs slow, audio terribly choppy.

Pocky & Rocky - runs full speed, occasional audio breakup.

Mortal Kombat II - Slightly slow, audio is very slow, crackly.

fbneo:

Thunder Fox - so slow it barely runs. Switched to MAME instead and it runs fine, but audio is slow. Seems to work ok at Frame Skip 1 and a slight audio latency adjustment.

Atari Star Wars - Audio stutters like crazy on death star explosion

Lucky & Wild - So slow it doesn’t work in fbneo. Switch to MAME and with frameskip can get it to almost full speed, but no amount of tweaking saves the audio from being a stuttering mess.

Alien 3: The Gun - Too slow to work on fbneo. Switched to MAME, but as above, while full speed the audio just will not run without stuttering into a garbled mess.

Operation Wolf / Operation Thunderbolt - Neither work in fbneo, too slow. Both work in MAME.

X68000:

Akumajo Dracula - Seems to be fine during the intro and title screen, and into the game for about 5 seconds before it all slows to a grinding unplayable mess. No amount of tweaking seems to resolve it.

As noted, there will likely be a lot more if these are early signs of things to come. I’m pretty sure SNES games shouldn’t be experiencing issues on this hardware, but I’m curious as to other people’s experiences with fbneo, X68k, SNES, MAME etc, and if everything ran fine for you out the gate on a Pi 3B+.

Thank you in advance for your input.

joinski

skykid

There are several things, you could check and try out:

Cooling: if your Pi3B+ runs too hot, it will throttle. Check temperatures and try to achieve max. temperatues below 70 degrees Celsius by using a propper heatsink and/or fan.
Power Supply: Check if your power supply is appropriate. Best is to use the official Pi3b+ power supply or a qualitative and sufficiently dimensioned (5V with at least 2.5Amps) alternative.
Emulators/Cores: check performance with other emulators/cores (there are several systems like SNES for example, where Batocera offes different emulators/cores to choose from).
Older version of Batocera: Try with 5.27.2 for example: https://mirrors.o2switch.fr/batocera/rpi3/stable/last/archives/20201001/

i guess point 4 will bring the best performance for you.

skykid

joinski

Wait… I need an older version of Batocera than the latest? :/

I Dl’d this one from the main site, the 3B+ build V35. To downgrade Batocera means I need to manually backup all my roms and files, do a fresh flash with the older build and then reinstall them all? That’s going to take a good while. Is it common knowledge that the latest is somehow inferior?

I can try changing some emulators, although in some cases this isn’t always an option (X68k doesn’t have the option). I’ll try changing SNES, but even then the problem seems widespread across different platforms.

Currently resting on the menu screen with the scraper running, my temperature is at 69 degrees. I’m guessing this will probably go up during gaming, so that might be the problem - but I do have a heatsink attached already.

My official PSU is on the way, and I’ll report back if it helps at all - but you’d advise downgrading Batocera as a first port of call?

joinski

skykid To downgrade Batocera means I need to manually backup all my roms and files, do a fresh flash with the older build and then reinstall them all?

No, you can do the manually downgrade procedure described in the wiki:
https://wiki.batocera.org/upgrade_manually
This way, you won’t lose any data on the userdata partition (roms, saves etc.)
But it is always recommended to have a backup in general.

skykid Is it common knowledge that the latest is somehow inferior?

not really, but sadly since v5.27.2 the performance decreased on RPi2/3 because of several reasons (complex topic and i can’t and don’t want to explain that in more detail because I don’t have the detailed knowledge about it)

skykid Currently resting on the menu screen with the scraper running, my temperature is at 69 degrees.

that’s a bit high, i guess. maybe try with a fan attached or a bigger heatsink (i can recommend using a full aluminium case like flirc, which acts as a big heatsink itself)

skykid but you’d advise downgrading Batocera as a first port of call?

you can try
but have a look at the yellow lightbulb here:
https://wiki.batocera.org/choose_a_single_board_computer#raspberry_pi_3

skykid

joinski

Appreciate your help on this.

I opened the retroflag case and left the top off. I positioned a small USB fan above the heatsink and in a few minutes the temperature dropped to 41%. I tested Star Fox and Akumajo Dracula (x68k) again and checked the temps before and after and the temperature stayed at 41%. Unfortunately there was no change to the slowing of the video and audio. I’ll keep testing, but early indications say overheating probably isn’t the issue.

Looking at the lightbulb I’m gleaning that Batocera 31 and above use a 64bit build that isn’t appropriate for the Pi3 model? Out of curiosity, what’s the number of the 2020 Batocera build you provided in the link?

I thought perhaps I needed to upgrade raspbian and that might be the issue. I don’t think I’ve done that on this Pi in a while because I was using the 4.

I’ll take a look at the downgrading option there and be sure to do a backup first. I’ve also got a Pi3B+ I never used, and it’s brand new. I’ll stick the current build and SD card in there just to rule out that the Pi3B+ I’m using isn’t at fault.

Thanks again!

joinski

skykid Looking at the lightbulb I’m gleaning that Batocera 31 and above use a 64bit build that isn’t appropriate for the Pi3 model? Out of curiosity, what’s the number of the 2020 Batocera build you provided in the link?

the lightbulb is just an information, that there was a change, that when upgrading from a previous version (before 32) you would need to replace the mentioned config file to make it work.
i guess a downgrade from a version above 32 to a version below (like v5.27.2, which is the 28th version of batocera… the name scheming changed after this version (before it was v5.xx like 5.01 to 5.27)) does not need to have to change anything, but just in case something does not work after downgrading it may be that you need to change the config-file in the opposite way.
see also changelog of batocera for more details/explanation (especially the first entries of 28 and 32):
https://batocera.org/changelog

joinski

skykid
What’s also worth a try:
The RPi2 Version of batocera 35 (yes this also works with RPi3). I just tried it on my RPi3B+ and got good performance in SNES and PS1 games (like Bloody Roar II, which is a harder to emulate PSX game), but i had to change the Audio Output to HDMI and reboot at least once (before that i had no audio via HDMI on my TV and performance was bad).

skykid

joinski

Would you mind trying Starfox on that build for me and let me know how it runs? I use that as a metric since it’s one of the most intensive games (and runs impossibly bad for me).

Edit:

I popped the SD card into the brand new Pi3B+ and the performance problems are identical. So that rules out hardware and overheating so far.

I tried Star Fox on SNES 9X NEXT as opposed to SNES 9X and performance only improved marginally. The audio is more stable with less break up, but still crackly and slow, and once in-game it’s all too slow to play. So that should rule out emulator specs.

It’s starting to look more and more like your first guess: The Batocera build and it’s compatibility with the hardware. That said I won’t know for 100% until the official PSU arrives. I’m hoping for magic that solves everything, but its worth noting that the PSU I use now was sold as a Pi3 configured PSU. Could have been lies, but I would have expected the seller to have a lot more complaints about it.

If it’s not the PSU that only leave the Pi build, which makes me wonder why the issue isn’t better documented online…

skykid

Right, like an idiot I was reading the upgrade/downgrade documentation and in experimentation dropped the url provided in the documentation (20200310) into the SSH window just to see how it worked, fully expecting a prompt I could cancel that would verify I was in the right place.

Instead, it immediately began the downgrade process to what I believe is Batocera 31? Anyway, successfully completed and then rebooted to a black screen. I read up on this and people suggest that it’s the HDMI settings that need adjusting in config.txt - but it isn’t an editable file and I keep making file copies with random extensions that need deleting. I assume everything is still there, as there were no errors in downgrading, but I can’t see anything and I can’t get a signal at all. How would I edit config.txt to get a picture.

I did this prior to backing up, b/c I’m dumb.

joinski

skykid
You can “upgrade” again to the version you used before (35) by simply extracting the boot.tar.xz file from here to the boot partition of the sd card:
https://mirrors.o2switch.fr/batocera/rpi3/stable/last/

and then you should backup all data on your userdata partition (share directory), so that if you mess something up, you don’t lose something important.

skykid I assume everything is still there

Yes, the data should not get lost. If you have a machine with linux you can put the sd card in it (via sd card reader for example) and then you can backup all data from the userdata partition as well.

Do you have a spare sd card laying around, which you could use for testing purpose? then you could flash the pi2 image of batocera 35 on it and test it. It’s always handy to have spare parts available.

skykid

joinski

I’ve come across a stupendous problem trying to do this: There’s not enough space in the card to extract the boot.tar into the boot folder. Unless I can either edit the config.txt file to get the HDMI to display properly, or find a way into the roms folder, I’m not sure how I can workaround this.

EDIT: While waiting to see if anything can be done about this, I flashed Batocera 27 to a new card. Going to test some games. However, I’m a tad disappointed to see the downgrade has lost a few nice aesthetic touches present in 35. I’m not sure at which point this changed, but I’m just using ES-Carbon-Theme set to Legacy, as I think this remains the most elegant, but some of the text and the console background images are extremely low quality and pixellated and the game directories have lost that nice semi-transparency they had. There are no more animated preview windows and the preview windows themselves aren’t great-looking, and that save state manager in the GUI will be sorely missed!

Performance is most important of course, I’m just wondering if any of these features were introduced in either build 28,29 or 30 (avoiding 31 and up).

Failing that, I’m not bad with photoshop and could probably style these elements myself, I’m just not sure where to switch out or overwrite the files.

EDIT: Build 27 is a nightmare to get sound working. Only 2 options and currently I’m using the headphone jack. Went into Kodi, set it to headphones and the sound works fine there, works fine on the video splash screen, but in Batocera there’s no sound whatsoever, and I’ve restarted 10 times already trying different things. Without sound I can’t properly test emulation.

joinski

skykid

On that spare sd card, where you flashed 5.27.2 on you could try and flash RPi2 v35 on and test it (as i mentioned, the RPi2 image of 35 also works on RPi3).

And for backupping the data from the sd card which doesn’t boot anymore: simply use a PC with linux installed, plug in the sd card and backup the files from the userdata (share) partition.
Another alternative (but i did not try that yet, so no guarantee this works): Boot from the working sd card and plug in the other sd card (via usb sd-card reader if you have one) and use the built-in file manager OD Commander (https://wiki.batocera.org/od_commander) to transfer the files from the not working sd to the working one

skykid There’s not enough space in the card to extract the boot.tar into the boot folder.

you could just delete the file named “batocera” (about 1.2gb big) located in the boot directory. The file “batocera.update” from the boot.tar.xz file should become the new “batocera” file upon booting.

skykid

I installed Batocera 30. The performance issues are identical.

On Batocera 27 there is no sound through the jack outside of KODI and the splash video (and I tried everything, even suggestions within this forum to modify the config.txt) and I can’t test over HDMI until I get home tonight, however, testing with my usual games, I can tell Thunder Fox in FBA is treacle slow, and Star Fox seems equally so. So no difference.

That means it’s unlikely to be the build and the last thing I can try is that new PSU. I’ll update if it does turn out to be that.

My main goal now is to try and salvage the games and files in the SD card that has no space, and I’m not sure how I can possibly do that. Thankfully I do have all my games backed up, but transferring and setting up everything again would be horrible.

skykid

joinski

Great, that’s something to try. I’ll see if I can get the stuff off using one of those methods. I don’t have a PC with Linux installed but I do have a Mac, which is linux based. Will that work?

Regarding the 27 build, it’s gone now. In the meantime I’ve tried build 29. Still slow and still no sound from the audio jack - this seems to have been busted across several builds now. And build 29’s X68000 seems to use a different emulated operating system and doesn’t want to boot the .hdf file, which worked out of the box on 35.

Since these issues are persistent across so many builds from 27-31, I now believe my power supply is most likely the issue. On the pre-35 builds the yellow lightning bolt is present constantly. So what I’m going to do is go back to a fresh install of 35 on the new card.

If I then have 35 visual and working on the fresh install, and then the one with the black screen and all my data working via USB card reader, what files would I need to overwrite using OD Commander to restore it back to how it was, settings and all?

Thank you once again for helping me troubleshoot this. This might turn out to be the greatest warning record on the web for having the correct PSU for the hardware.

joinski

skykid I do have a Mac, which is linux based. Will that work?

Don’t know. I never used Mac

skykid still no sound from the audio jack

even if you change Audio Output/Device/Profile in ES and reboot after that? Is the audio jack connected at boot? What happens, if you inplug and plug in again after booting and then change the setting in ES and reboot?

skykid the yellow lightning bolt is present constantly

that’s definitely a bad sign and can cause stability and performance issues

skykid what files would I need to overwrite using OD Commander to restore it back to how it was, settings and all?

the complete userdata/share partition/folder with all its contents to be sure.

Did you already try the RPi2 version of 35 on your RPi3b+?

skykid

joinski

joinski the complete userdata/share partition/folder with all its contents to be sure.

Did you already try the RPi2 version of 35 on your RPi3b+?

This is the only one I didn’t try. But to be honest after trying everything from 27 to 31 and seeing no change, I’m pretty sure the PSU is responsible. I’ve crossed off everything else possible except that. And the official one is expected to arrive today, so I should know soon enough. If performance issues persist I might test the Pi2 build.

joinski even if you change Audio Output/Device/Profile in ES and reboot after that? Is the audio jack connected at boot? What happens, if you inplug and plug in again after booting and then change the setting in ES and reboot?

Literally tried everything, including some suggestions to the config.txt that I found on these forums. Worth noting earlier builds lack the Audio Profile option and are limited to just two: HDMI and JACK, with no other configurations available. It’s not actually the setup either, as there is sound in the splash video on boot and in KODI. Weird and annoying.

Issue: OD Commander doesn’t seem to be recognising the USB plugged in. I’m not sure if there’s something more I need to do. It’s possible the card is corrupted, but it did say it completed the downgrade totally and was ready to reboot.

EDIT:

So I got into the unresponsive card by plugging it in via USB reader, setting the storage to Any External and rebooting. To my surprise the reboot worked and I got in, to find a fresh 35 build install untouched and ready to go. All userdata is gone, all games and everything, completely wiped. So when the downgrade says ‘this will never touch your userdata, like never ever’ didn’t seem to go right for me. Interestingly, if I remove the card and put it back into the Pi card slot and boot normally, it still never gets past the black screen - it’s only visible as an Any External drive.

I FTPd into it just to make sure the userdata was all formatted and that’s definitely the case.

So it’s back to square one for me, time to start moving some stuff over.

For future reference, if I go to System Settings > Install on a New Disk, that will allow me to make a complete clone to another SD card? I also see it has hardware listed too, so potentially I could clone a Pi3 setup and have it ready to go straight into a Pi4?

joinski

skykid

So to sum up the issues you have faced:

from 5.27.2 to 31 - no audio jack working
Downgrade from 35 to 5.27.2 on RPi3B+ resulted in not booting anymore and userdata got lost
is that correct?

skykid For future reference, if I go to System Settings > Install on a New Disk, that will allow me to make a complete clone to another SD card? I also see it has hardware listed too, so potentially I could clone a Pi3 setup and have it ready to go straight into a Pi4?

The function “Install on a New Disk” will not clone anything. It simply downloads the latest stable version of batocera and installs it onto the target device (and it will whipe all data from the target device during the process, that’s why you have to confirm, that you are sure to do it). So it is a fresh install with just the stock data on it.

skykid

joinski

joinski from 5.27.2 to 31 - no audio jack working
Downgrade from 35 to 5.27.2 on RPi3B+ resulted in not booting anymore and userdata got lost
is that correct?

from 5.27.2 to 31 - no audio jack working
Poor performance with lightning bolt low power warning (probably the culprit) on everything from 5.27.2 to 31, and 35
Downgrade from 35 to 5.27.2 on RPi3B+ resulted in not booting anymore and userdata got lost: correct

I have the official Pi PSU in my hand, so about to do the final performance test.

skykid

And it’s all the PSU. Man, I wish it had arrived just before I smoked my build. A day too late. 😐

Official PSU is the only way. Build 35 seems perfect, X68k running full speed, no audio issues. Same for Star Fox. Thunder Fox now runs flawlessly on FBneo. Turns out games like Alien 3: The Gun must just not work with FBneo because problems persist there, but it’s full speed on MAME (and littered with graphical issues as it happens).

Anyway, hopefully this thread helps someone, but I’m going to update the OP with the relevant info: buy the right PSU.

One final question before I close this: I’m thinking about expanding my SD Card size. Can I clone a 128gb card to a 256gb card using Balena Etcher without issues, and still have the extra space once the cloning is done. Or is there a better way.

Thanks again for all your help the last 24hrs.

joinski

skykid Can I clone a 128gb card to a 256gb card using Balena Etcher without issues, and still have the extra space once the cloning is done.

I guess you can do this (expanding the space) with gparted for example. Personally i would just backup the data and copy it over to the 256gb card, after flashing batocera on it.