Super Retro-Cade

PSX_Specter · Oct 17, 2018

I managed to get lakka to install and boot from nand. Had to install a developers version. This version doesn't seem to contain the uEnv.txt, so I am now trying different versions to see which performs best, etc. Unfortunately the versions I have tried have a locked down OS just like the current versions, so still no editing fstab or installing packages

. Installing to nand involved installing to sd card first, then running /usr/bin/emmc_install.sh for anyone interested. Google is your friend for finding the developer's versions. the ones that are for orangepi "plus" models will play nice with the onboard nand. Still much to do here, but it's something. BE AWARE: If you do this, the retro-cade may or may not automatically boot from SD card, you could be stuck with the buggy dev version of lakka you flashed to the nand. Noobs will break their robot.

WD_GASTER2 · Oct 18, 2018

so umm in your particular case where you able to still boot from sd card afterwards?
because if so then you can just dump yourself an image of the current and write it to the internal nand in the future so you dont have to go through all of this again

PSX_Specter · Oct 18, 2018

WD_GASTER2 said:
so umm in your particular case where you able to still boot from sd card afterwards?
because if so then you can just dump yourself an image of the current and write it to the internal nand in the future so you dont have to go through all of this again

I was able to boot from a card with an install of lakka on it. I could not boot a card with lakka "ready to install". It would revert to booting from the nand. If I understand you, I would have to make an install on a 4GB-ish card then dd it to the nand? Lakka doesn't support resizing the file system.

PSX_Specter · Oct 18, 2018

WD_GASTER2 said:
so umm in your particular case where you able to still boot from sd card afterwards?
because if so then you can just dump yourself an image of the current and write it to the internal nand in the future so you dont have to go through all of this again

I just realized you may have been referring to the current lakka image. :wacko:

I was never able to get it to boot from nand. Guessing if you have had it working, i messed up the syntax in uEnv.txt.

WD_GASTER2 · Oct 18, 2018

what im saying is this:

you managed to install lakka and boot it to the nand right?

if so can you still boot from the sd card (the version of lakka that mounts the nand on the board separately)

and if so you can now dump the current nand snapshot which has a booting lakka image on your nand and keep it to simply dd the nand in the future.

PSX_Specter · Oct 18, 2018

WD_GASTER2 said:
what im saying is this:

you managed to install lakka and boot it to the nand right?

if so can you still boot from the sd card (the version of lakka that mounts the nand on the board separately)

and if so you can now dump the current nand snapshot which has a booting lakka image on your nand and keep it to simply dd the nand in the future.

I get you now. I haven't really had any issues to speak of other than the "pre-install" lakka card that wouldn't boot. I can always boot my 64GB card with all my games, etc on it and fix things right up through SSH. I tend to format the nand every time i try something new, so storing anything on it is no good. Who knows? I may end up just putting your custom dash on it, or just store roms on it. I have no need for a copy of the bootable nand with lakka as I have not found a setup that I am happy with yet. I can't use an orange pi lite image because it doesn't support nand and I can't just edit the uEnv.txt to enable it like we did previously because it doesn't exist. If anyone could give me any help in that regard it would be much appreciated.

WD_GASTER2 · Oct 19, 2018

has anybody gotten their uart cables yet? i would appreciate some help if somebody would like to test the homebrew dash im porting.

WD_GASTER2 · Oct 20, 2018

kuwanger · Oct 20, 2018

Nifty. I haven't gotten the uart cable mostly because I realized I have a CHIP so I should be able to connect the uart that way. That is, if I ever get around to opening my Super Retro-Cade. :/ Honestly, I'm enough of an idiot that I'm afraid I'll break something. I'd feel differently if I could do something semi-intelligent with a uart except possibly trying to dump logs or something, although I doubt even with that I'd be able to construct a valid dtb. That's basically the only thing missing, IMHO.

PSX_Specter · Oct 20, 2018

kuwanger said:
Nifty. I haven't gotten the uart cable mostly because I realized I have a CHIP so I should be able to connect the uart that way. That is, if I ever get around to opening my Super Retro-Cade. :/ Honestly, I'm enough of an idiot that I'm afraid I'll break something. I'd feel differently if I could do something semi-intelligent with a uart except possibly trying to dump logs or something, although I doubt even with that I'd be able to construct a valid dtb. That's basically the only thing missing, IMHO.

I wonder if the good folks at Lakka would make a build for us if we asked nicely? Aside from what I presume to be memory leaks, the orangepi-pc(-plus).dtb on a orangepi-lite image seems very stable. Other .dtb's/builds tend to lock up when transferring large files. I have transferred 30GB+ without issue over usb to ethernet. A working version of openelec would be great, too. I found that the developer's version of lakka for beelink-x2 got starfox running nearly full speed on snes9x_2010 core with only the occasional audio crackle. Unfortunately I had terrible luck with arcade emulators on that build. I guess what I am saying is that there's still untapped potential. On the android side of things, I would love to see how the video decoding performs versus linux. Better memory management and the presumably better video driver could get some of the less demanding N64 titles working as well.
@WD_GASTER2: If I thought I could help you, I would gladly buy a usb to uart. About the only thing useful I have ever tried in android is adding .ko files to make game controllers work. Oh, and I added a nice "The Pirate Bay" boot logo to my Retro-cade's stock firmware.

kuwanger · Oct 20, 2018

PSX_Specter said:
I wonder if the good folks at Lakka would make a build for us if we asked nicely?

I wouldn't be surprised if they were willing to if we could provide them useful information* and the amount of effort was relatively trivial. Then again, the whole matter with non-commercial emulators being used commercially might dissuade them from in any helping in use of the device. *shrug*

I do find it very interesting that you experience lock ups from transferring large files. I'm not sure if it's memory leaks causing the lock ups; I'd presume it's more that the system as a whole wasn't designed with only 256MB in mind and is frequently surpassing that amount**. It would likely be useful to actual log what's going on in the system while it's happening to see if there's any specific pattern to it. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good, simple tool for the task.

* For example, figuring out what hardware works with what dtb might give an idea of what the device arrangement/mapping is like. The fact that sound doesn't work with some dtb or /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq is sometimes missing could help narrow things down. Probably the easiest thing would be for them to actually have one.

** That might seem like a quibbling point, but if it's a matter of not being designed for it vs a a memory leak, the former is a lot easier to do something about.

PSX_Specter · Oct 20, 2018

kuwanger said:
I wouldn't be surprised if they were willing to if we could provide them useful information* and the amount of effort was relatively trivial. Then again, the whole matter with non-commercial emulators being used commercially might dissuade them from in any helping in use of the device. *shrug*

I do find it very interesting that you experience lock ups from transferring large files. I'm not sure if it's memory leaks causing the lock ups; I'd presume it's more that the system as a whole wasn't designed with only 256MB in mind and is frequently surpassing that amount**. It would likely be useful to actual log what's going on in the system while it's happening to see if there's any specific pattern to it. Unfortunately, I don't know of a good, simple tool for the task.

* For example, figuring out what hardware works with what dtb might give an idea of what the device arrangement/mapping is like. The fact that sound doesn't work with some dtb or /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq is sometimes missing could help narrow things down. Probably the easiest thing would be for them to actually have one.

** That might seem like a quibbling point, but if it's a matter of not being designed for it vs a a memory leak, the former is a lot easier to do something about.

I believe you're right about the kernel being designed for a certain amount of ram. the orangepi lite has 512MB, making it the closest designed for our hardware in terms of ram, and Lakka does a nice job of hiding the out of memory crash by elegantly restarting. At least that's what I think is going on. Sometimes large neogeo games require a reboot or a couple tries to get loaded. (sigh) Remember what was accomplished on the OG Xbox with 64MB of ram?
Have you dug around in partition 2 to see if lakka is logging anything? I wouldn't know where to look.

kuwanger · Oct 21, 2018

Lakka uses systemd so I believe "journalctl" should give useful results. The logs should be stored in /var/log/journal/, but I don't think they survive a reboot. So you can either copy them to /storage/ or possibly modify /etc/fstab to map some folder on /storage/ to point to /var to keep the logs. I'm not exactly sure where the scripts are that do the actual mounting so I'm not 100% sure about fstab. The other problem is that the root with /etc/fstab/ is in a squash filesystem on at least the release version so not trivially editable. :/

PSX_Specter · Oct 21, 2018

kuwanger said:
Lakka uses systemd so I believe "journalctl" should give useful results. The logs should be stored in /var/log/journal/, but I don't think they survive a reboot. So you can either copy them to /storage/ or possibly modify /etc/fstab to map some folder on /storage/ to point to /var to keep the logs. I'm not exactly sure where the scripts are that do the actual mounting so I'm not 100% sure about fstab. The other problem is that the root with /etc/fstab/ is in a squash filesystem on at least the release version so not trivially editable. :/

I was not able to produce anything useful in /var/log, just log.nmbd and log.smbd. There was no /var/log/journal/ after running journalctl. I did find something of interest, though. Our SOC is stamped H3Q, which to my googlestanding is an H3 with a quad core MALI 400 variant. Not sure what sbc's or tv boxes use that chip.

Edit- according to a post on atariage, "The SoC is an AllWinner H3Q (as seen in the OldSchoolRetroGamer review) which is basically the same as the R16 in the (S)NES mini"

UPDATE: Xbox 360 wireless controller w/pc dongle wasn't working correctly. My playstation 1/2 to usb adapter was not working, either. Tried Lakka-Allwinner.orangepi_lite.arm-2.1-rc6.img and presto ! They work. However, mame_2003 core didn't work at that point. Downloading it and placing it in the cores folder then rebooting fixed it. As before, edit uEnv.txt. Still testing the pros and cons of this setup, but having every controller I can get my hands on working now is pretty epic. Strangely enough, the first controller I tried was my logitech cordless rumblepad 2, and It didn't need configured. This has been the case with every image I have tried. Evidenty it's what lakka's developer is using. Performance seems to be the same between the release image we are using and the RC image. I didn't try running it from nand as it uses the uEnv boot method and not boot.scr, KERNEL, script.bin, and SYSTEM like the nand bootable images.

WD_GASTER2 · Oct 24, 2018

progress log for stuff on my last few days has been nearly non-existent. just added the ability to set your own wallpaper to my launcher via the sd card and SD card storage detection code.
it can also detect which version of the firmware you have.

ArugulaZ · Oct 24, 2018

Gaster: Will this run straight from an SD card or will it need to be installed on the NAND?

WD_GASTER2 · Oct 25, 2018

it can work from both. though to be fair its kind of nerfed when running from the SD. the kernel doesnt detect the SD as an external storage but as a nand when booted this way. Although if people are interested in this they will probably have to buy a 5 dollar uart to usb cable on amazon to give themselves the full access to install homebrew.

kuwanger · Oct 25, 2018

So, a little over a week ago I sent an email to Retro-Bit asking for the source to all the emulator stuff they used (because GPLv2), and I got an automated reply saying I'd get a response in 48-72 hours. Eight days later (a couple days ago), I got a reply "Thank you for your email! A representative from our customer support team will be in contact with you shortly." So, maybe next week I'll actually hear something from them?

PSX_Specter · Oct 25, 2018

WD_GASTER2 said:
it can work from both. though to be fair its kind of nerfed when running from the SD. the kernel doesnt detect the SD as an external storage but as a nand when booted this way. Although if people are interested in this they will probably have to buy a 5 dollar uart to usb cable on amazon to give themselves the full access to install homebrew.

Guess I will be ordering a uart to usb and getting my learn on. Does it need to be six pin or five pin? Are there specific protocols it needs to adhere to in able to work with the retro-cade? Have you got a media player running yet? I would love to know how the device performs vs linux in that regard. In my experience with my odroid c2, the performance difference between the linux and android driver for the mali gpu is huge. I want the crappy retro-bit OS off my emmc. If I have to change the aspect ratio of a game one more time I may be tempted to change the aspect ratio of the device with a hammer :hateit:

@kuwanger : That's a pretty interesting development. Well poised, asking for the source. If they try to cheese out and send you a linux distro or some other OS image or something, it's still good. If they don't respond appropriately in any way, then I guess it would just be more proof of shady business practices. Maybe the super retro-cades were all manufactured on a boat in the south pacific and are as such governed by maritime law... and kaiju.

WD_GASTER2 · Oct 26, 2018

i use this:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...Vj7rACh2vzwrPEAYYAiABEgKmXPD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds

i set the jumper to 3.3 and just connect the rx tx and gnd respectively. from there putty works wonders. think of it controlling linux through command line.

WD_GASTER2 · Nov 2, 2018

Well im happy with this so far. Still thinking if i should re-do the UI to allocate for a GBA banner. :S meh probably not.
I think this is as far the dash can go either way. quite frankly i should be porting this dash to the tinkerboard. dem 2 gb's of ram would be nice to have.

Super Retro-Cade

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