RetroPie experience

[stuartcamerondeakin]

I thought I'd share my overwhelmingly positive experience getting RetroPie installed and running on the Orange Pi 5 using this Ubuntu distribution.

RetroPie installation

Installing the core RetroPie was basically seamless. So far I've tried Arcade/MAME, N64, PSP and with some custom tweaking I've managed to get the Dolphin emulator running with Wii & GameCube games.

EmulationStation has a blank bar at the top, its fullscreen position is offset from the top of the screen. I see there's a hack fix for this in the /usr/bin/emulationstation script, but it's not working for some reason. That's still on my TODO list.

Performance

Wii and GameCube games when running at native resolution run at more or less full frame-rate. Increasing the resolution or enabling anti-aliasing drops the frame rate.

PSP runs at full frame rate at 2x resolution.

I can't get over how powerful this hardware is, and hopefully things will get even better as drivers improve.

Wii / GameCube via Dolphin

Startup Crash

Out of the box this emulator crashes on startup, you'll need to set the QT_QPA_PLATFORM value to xcb, I've pasted the line

export QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb

into my /usr/bin/emulationstation script.

Shader crash

There's an issue listed here https://bugs.dolphin-emu.org/issues/13198 affecting the Orange PI 5. You'll need to check out dolphin-emu/dolphin#11628 and build Dolphin locally with this fix until this PR gets merged. I build a "portable" version so everything's standalone.

GFX.ini

You'll need to set Dolphin to use OpenGL ES.

In your freshly build dolphin folder edit dolphin/build/Binaries/user/Config/GFX.ini and ensure you've got this:

[Settings]
PreferGLES = True

Config

You'll want to launch Dolphin manually first-time around to configure it to launch in full-screen and set up your controller mappings.

QT_QPA_PLATFORM=xcb ./dolphin-emu

Setup Custom Dolphin for EmulationStation

Add a line to /opt/retropie/configs/wii/emulators.xml and /opt/retropie/configs/gc/emulators.xml such as:
dolphin-gui-opi="/home/[username]/dolphin/build/Binaries/dolphin-emu -b -e %ROM%"

Then launch a game image, press a button from the runner screen and select the new dolphin-gui-opi emulator config.

Driver Support

Everything I've tried from a Wifi dongle to PS4 controller and my zero delay USB encoders for my arcade cabinet have all just worked flawlessly.

[stuartcamerondeakin]

I would like to add that @Joshua-Riek has done an AMAZING job with this image, it's incredibly stable and "just works". THANK YOU!!

[HSTe]

I guess this is the same problem with screen:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/33999/emulationstation-loads-slightly-too-low-ubuntu-22-04/4

Have you tested different video drivers?

[stuartcamerondeakin]

I worked out about 30 mins ago that commenting out the full screen hack and the setting of SDL to Wayland in /use/bin/emulationstation fixes the issue, without having to change anything global.

[HectorPulido]

Did you try it with the wiimotes? Mine doesn't work 😢
Only works for a second if I run dolphin as sudo and then gets disconnected

[stuartcamerondeakin]

Nah, I haven't gone down that route, I was mostly after GameCube emulation.

[diegov-au]

My wiimotes work great with a Dolphin Bar. Ensure continuous scanning is switched on under controller settings.