[Raspberry Pi feature request] N64 - more emulator options please!

Xanac_13

Hi. I think we all know the story with N64 emulation by now. Certainly when it comes to low powered devices like the Pi. I have a Pi 400 (as well as a 3B and a Zero) and it’s pretty clear that performance is getting worse on this device with Mupen64Plus-Next sadly. This is not unique to Batocera, though it does work well for some games.

I’ve tried the other option (Glide64MK2) and between both emulators we can enjoy some reasonably decent performance to an expected realistic degree. However, it’s not quite enough and I would love to see other options added for the Pi.

Could Parallel be added and/or also Rice as an option? Having these available at least would mean that we could get something like Mystical Ninja to run pretty well for example, among others. As it is with only the two options, it means solutions to some titles running well can exhaust quickly meaning many don’t run at all. To add, I don’t have a particularly large library for N64.

Anyway, thanks for considering. :-)

Atari

CPU compiler and other options can be adjusted in the advanced system options of some of the emulators, you might get better performances in certain games by adjusting these.

Xanac_13

Yes, well it’s because I’d exhausted these options that I made this post! Mostly, N64 is not too bad tbf. Even Goldeneye seems to run much better than it used to, as long as certain options and modes are selected. But there’s always outlier cases, and nothing I can do with Mystical Ninja makes any difference. It runs extremely poorly. If I use RICE on Recalbox, it runs very well with little user intervention, but well, I’m a Batocera fan…

Hence my post.😉

Atari

I thought one of these was the RICE plugin, excuse me. Is there something missing from Batocera then? N64 is such a popular system that I’d assume it would be extensively covered.

Xanac_13

Atari I thought one of these was the RICE plugin, excuse me. Is there something missing from Batocera then? N64 is such a popular system that I’d assume it would be extensively covered.

Sorry for late reply. Batocera only has 2 options for N64 - either lr-mupen64plus-nx or glide64mk2. There’s no separate RICE (or any other) option as on Recalbox unless I’m missing something. Granted, glide64mk2 is very, very good on low end hardware despite it’s age but it can’t do Mystical Ninja. And lr-mupen64plus-nx has seen performance drop consistently over the last few releases to the point where I don’t even use it for SM64 anymore. Not sure if this is because it is becoming more accurate (and hence more demanding) or due to other technical reasons, but as of v35 it’s really a no-go on the Pi 4 sadly.

Atari

Xanac_13 Go to the N64 game list. Then press Select. Go to “Advanced system options”. Then scroll down to “RDP Plugin”. You will see three options: GLIDEN64 (FASTEST), PARALLEL-RDP and ANGRYLION. The Angrylion one is a low-level emulator, which should run pretty much anything you through at it, but the catch is that it’s the most unstable in terms of emulation speed, very high requirements.

The CPU core can also be switched out from Dynarec (the fastest, but least compatible) to one of the interpreter options, which like Angrylion is more compatible but much harder to run.

Xanac_13

Atari Go to the N64 game list. Then press Select. Go to “Advanced system options”. Then scroll down to “RDP Plugin”. You will see three options: GLIDEN64 (FASTEST), PARALLEL-RDP and ANGRYLION. The Angrylion one is a low-level emulator, which should run pretty much anything you through at it, but the catch is that it’s the most unstable in terms of emulation speed, very high requirements.

These options don’t work on the Raspberry Pi 4. That is to say, you can change these options in the Batocera menu as you suggest, but they have no effect as the only option on Pi 4 in mupen64plus-nx is GlideN64 and it will just default to this. If you go into the Retroarch menu you’ll see this.

Atari

Xanac_13 If so, that’s a bug, and an issue report would be appreciated.

Xanac_13

Atari

No worries. I’ll double-check, make sure I’m not talking any crap here, and post a bug up.