Attention PiGRRL 1 Owners, I got RetroPie working!

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Dr_Wily
 
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Attention PiGRRL 1 Owners, I got RetroPie working!

Post by Dr_Wily »

This post is for owners of the original PiGRRL DIY gameboy kit. (& Cupcade kit)

Background: I built the original PiGRRL a few months ago and really enjoy it, both as a project and as a way to play some of my favorite old school games. I even modified it by adding a mini amp, speaker, and volume control. But after a while, I found the emulator selection on the original CupCade image to be limiting. The NES emulation was playable, but the MAME roms did not run very well at all. Furthermore, you were limited to only horizontal screen games. So I looked into building my own image.

My OS of choice is Fedora, but the support for Raspberry Pi is poor. While I was able to get Fedora 23 working flawlessly on the Raspberry Pi 3, they no longer support images compatible with the older Pi Model B. Then I found out RetroPie maintains images that work on older RPi. I learned how to get those images working with the PiTFT here. Unfortunately, the initial results were BANNED...

The RPi 1 Model B has a very weak CPU. It's BARELY powerful enough to do emulation on a normal monitor or TV, let alone a TFT screen. Out of the box, following the above guide for frame buffer copying, NES games didn't run well at all. I imagine making the original CupCade image was a chore. Based on everything I had read up until that point, it seemed like there was little or no hope of getting smooth RetroPie emulation working on a PiGRRL 1. However, I'm not one to give up easily.

After 2 days of methodical experimentation, research, and hacking... I was able to establish an acceptable balance of OS configuration, emulator settings, overclock, and TFT refresh rate. I created a modified RetroPie image that works flawlessly with the original PiGRRL. With this image you have access to RetroPie's full emulator selection, a gargantuan improvement over the original CupCade image. Incidentally, this image should work with the CupCade kit as well.

What works: I haven't had time to do exhaustive testing of the full emulator selection, but I can say that most things pre-1991 will work very well. Systems with full speed emulation include NES, PC Engine, Genesis, Neogeo, etc. I imagine Master System and Gameboy work well too. MAME is hit or miss as always, but a very large number of games work well. Both horizontal and vertical screen games work in MAME. I have tested DOSBox and it works really well (with keyboard). It includes a native version of Quake 3 Arena that I have configured to be playable with the PiGRRL's limited controls. All the menus and font sizes have been tweaked to be readable on the 320x240 screen. Most configuration can be done without a keyboard. You now have the ability to adjust the volume via the RetroPie menus.

[DISCLAIMER] A considerable amount of overclocking was required for everything to work right. I take no responsibility if you damage your Pi with this image. That being said, the settings I used have proven to be stable and reliable on my PiGRRL. They are not overly extreme. However, every integrated circuit has different thresholds. If you find the overclock to be unstable on your PiGRRL, you can make adjustments at the bottom of the /boot/config.txt file. I recommend reducing the arm_freq or sdram_freq in increments of 25 until things are stable. Don't touch the core_freq. If everything works perfect and you are feeling adventurous, you can try reducing the over_voltage in increments of 1 to increase battery life. Don't increase the over_voltage above 6. Here are the settings I used:

Code: Select all

arm_freq=950
core_freq=250
sdram_freq=575
over_voltage=6
[INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS]

1. Download the futureboy_p1b.gz image from here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByBa_y ... sp=sharing
2. Use gzip and dd to copy the image onto the SD card with the following command:

Code: Select all

gzip -dc /path_to_image/futureboy_p1b.gz | dd of=/dev/sde
* The name of the SD device can vary. In my case it was sde, but it can also be mmcblk0. You can use the blkid command to figure out what your SD device is called.
** The image is optimized for a 4gb SD card, like the one that came with the PiGRRL. If you are using a larger SD card, use gparted or raspi-config to grow the partition and use the extra free space.


Copying the image to the SD card takes around 20 minutes. If all goes well, you should be able to just pop the SD card into your PiGRRL and boot up into RetroPie. Boot up takes slightly longer than the Cupcade image, don't be alarmed. The easiest way to add roms is with something like Filezilla or your favorite FTP client. The root rom directory is /home/pi/RetroPie/roms. Each system/emulator has it's own rom directory, be sure to put them in the right spot.

Hopefully this turns out to be a viable emulation alternative for everyone with a PiGRRL! I enjoyed it so much, I felt guilty keeping it to myself. Feel free to make comments and enjoy!

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CBRider
 
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Re: Attention PiGRRL 1 Owners, I got RetroPie working!

Post by CBRider »

I know it's been a while since you posted this but I'm having trouble getting the .gz file onto my SD card. I have Ubuntu and all I can use is .IMG files. Is there anyway to convert it? Also, isn't the file from your Google drive supposed to be a IMG.gz? Thanks

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Dr_Wily
 
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Joined: Thu May 26, 2016 8:15 am

Re: Attention PiGRRL 1 Owners, I got RetroPie working!

Post by Dr_Wily »

Don't worry, Ubuntu should be able to do everything I listed above. Just follow the instructions, it's only a single command and all you have to modify is the path. There is no need to convert it, because it unzips and copies the image over to the SD card with a single command. If you are encountering an error that is stopping you from running the above command, post it here and maybe we can work around it.

To answer your question about .gz files...
The file name can be any valid name that fits the following naming convention: *.gz
Some people do *.IMG.gz for clarity, but it's not necessary.

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CBRider
 
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Joined: Sat Mar 28, 2015 6:08 am

Re: Attention PiGRRL 1 Owners, I got RetroPie working!

Post by CBRider »

Awesome, I'll give it a try again tonight and see if I can get it working. Thank you for the speedy reply. I'll post back tonight with whether or not I could get it working.

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VERAULT
 
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Re: Attention PiGRRL 1 Owners, I got RetroPie working!

Post by VERAULT »

Dr. Wily (yes replying to this posting WAY TOO late) I also added a speaker to my Pigrrl 1, but didnt do volume control. Would you mind posting how you did volume control on your model? Also thanks for this post, I was going nuts trying to add additional support to my Pigrrl 1 but assumed the world has gave up on this device!

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