New Raspberry Pi 4 model launches today, comes with 8GB RAM

raxadian · May 28, 2020

I wonder what's the most powerful console you can accurate emulate with so much Ram on a Pi 4?

Jayinem81 · May 28, 2020

raxadian said:
I wonder what's the most powerful console you can accurate emulate with so much Ram on a Pi 4?

I'm guessing here so if someone smarter than me shoots me down that's fine, but maybe PCSX2 or Dolphin? But I'm not sure if it could handle either.

matpower · May 28, 2020

kublai said:
I'm waiting to see if Retropie builds can make use of the bigger RAM from 4GB to 8GB RAM to see if there's a significant improvments.

raxadian said:
I wonder what's the most powerful console you can accurate emulate with so much Ram on a Pi 4?

RAM doesn't matter that much to emulation, Pi 4 wise, it is going to be stuck at Dreamcast/PSP because the CPU doesn't have enough power for anything else.

Jayinem81 said:
I'm guessing here so if someone smarter than me shoots me down that's fine, but maybe PCSX2 or Dolphin? But I'm not sure if it could handle either.

PCSX2 has too many x86 specific hacks to run properly in ARM. There was a hacky attempt for Android which was "okay-ish" but it required a lot more power than the Pi4 has. Same goes for Dolphin, it needs a Snapdragon 845-tier CPU + GPU combo to run it, the former isn't close on the Pi4, and the latter is pretty much anemic on Pi4 as nothing gets close to high-end Adreno in the ARM world.

Darth Meteos · May 28, 2020

I've been long considering getting a micro computer like the raspberry pi to use with retropie. Does anyone have a primer where I can consider the options and what they give me?

cracker · May 28, 2020

That's a big price jump considering how cheap their boards have always been.

Side note: Where's the Pi Zero W 2?

Darth Meteos said:
I've been long considering getting a micro computer like the raspberry pi to use with retropie. Does anyone have a primer where I can consider the options and what they give me?

Check out ETA PRIME and ExplainingComputers on YouTube. They both have great info on various SBCs.

RedBlueGreen · May 28, 2020

I'd rather get an ODROID than any Raspberry Pi. Like others have said, every other component will be bottlenecking you before there's an issue of needing 8 GB of RAM for anything.

It's still gonna be no go good for anything but emulators and possibly some of the better mobile games (if the CPU and GPU don't bottle neck it like crazy). Or as a media center.

Meanwhile the ODROID N2 may only boast 4 GB DDR4 RAM, but it has pretty decent specs everywhere else. And the only reason they don't sell as well is because they're rightfully a bit more costly and they're not documented to death for newbies who don't know what they're doing. Looks to cost about the same as the 8 GB Pi 4.

Darth Meteos said:
I've been long considering getting a micro computer like the raspberry pi to use with retropie. Does anyone have a primer where I can consider the options and what they give me?

You'd probably be better off finding an old i3-2320 Dell Optiplex and a decent used low profile GPU. Though the integrated graphics will work fine for anything pre PS2/GCN era (even some 2D Dreamcast titles might work). You can find these PCs for under $50 sometimes on eBay, less in a thrift store.

64bitmodels · May 28, 2020

Literally no one uses a Pi for anything other than emulation, and even then Pi emulatiors are a big niche
even then it's midrange and nothing compared to the ODroid-XU4 like others have said
and even then if you wanted a portable emulation machine... just hack a switch??? or a psvita??? or build a gboy???
Don't see any good reason to get this

Kioku · May 28, 2020

64bitmodels said:
Literally no one uses a Pi for anything other than emulation, and even then Pi emulatiors are a big niche
Don't see any good reason to get this

Eh, not true. People use the Pi for a variety of things. Seen smart mirrors, robotics, even alarm clocks. The Pi is capable of a lot of things. Still, there's no reason to tack on extra RAM.

tech3475 · May 28, 2020

64bitmodels said:
Literally no one uses a Pi for anything other than emulation, and even then Pi emulatiors are a big niche
even then it's midrange and nothing compared to the ODroid-XU4 like others have said
and even then if you wanted a portable emulation machine... just hack a switch??? or a psvita??? or build a gboy???
Don't see any good reason to get this

But I don’t use mine for emulation and instead something else....does this mean I don’t exist?

64bitmodels · May 28, 2020

tech3475 said:
But I don’t use mine for emulation and instead something else....does this mean I don’t exist?

yes, tech3475, you are hereby null3475
still when i go into the raspberry pi scene the first thing i see are emulation machines, emulation machines, emulation machines. it doesnt make sense to me when phones and portable consoles exist..

Kioku · May 28, 2020

64bitmodels said:
yes, tech3475, you are hereby null3475
still when i go into the raspberry pi scene the first thing i see are emulation machines, emulation machines, emulation machines. it doesnt make sense to me when phones and portable consoles exist..

I've tried retro gaming on a phone. It's not all that great, even with a massive library at my hands. Especially when you move it over to a big screen, which is where the Pi comes in. It's a cheap machine that is very capable of playing older titles at, or near full speed. Up to the n64 era, and even PSP. Yeah, there are mobile Pi builds that are cool. Those usually consist of Pi Zeroes and certain 3 boards. :v

FAST6191 · May 28, 2020

64bitmodels said:
Literally no one uses a Pi for anything other than emulation, and even then Pi emulatiors are a big niche
even then it's midrange and nothing compared to the ODroid-XU4 like others have said
and even then if you wanted a portable emulation machine... just hack a switch??? or a psvita??? or build a gboy???
Don't see any good reason to get this

I think you may have fallen into an echo chamber there. If nothing else you are seriously underestimating the XBMC/Kodi crowd as well.
As for hacking/building one of those. If I want something reasonably coherent and stable then a pi represents a solid choice too and I would probably take one over those, even with all I am. Outside chance I would have one of those if I also wanted to play the commercial games from them but eh, and I would probably still have a pi as a secondary. We have long since departed the xbox and wii world where that was a thing people reasonably wanted to do.

The pi family is more or less the popular choice for the technically a fully fledged computer board for programmable devices, and has been since it came in and stomped all over pogoplug/sheevaplug. This despite some very serious contenders to the crown from big tech companies, small tech companies and devices with more power than it.

More options than something like an arduino, can be a low power server and does not have the clunk of a
"ah might as well get a cheap android tablet" did creep in there for some things but they are still mightily popular. Between such tablets and these sorts of things the old embedded device market that charges thousands for a small niche has been running terrified for years now.

I have installed them in many places for many things. One of the more interesting I did was signage for small businesses. You know those places with TVs in the window that cycle round their offers/features/promo videos/...? Go see how much one of those costs, especially if you don't want to pay monthly.
I can replicate it, if not better, with a pi and a screen/projector. If you have a person in your office that can update a wordpress site, update an ebay store or similar (so basically anybody under 40 and no small number over these days) then they can update it too take things off automatically, show only during certain times...

The early promo stuff where they were thinking it was going to be like the old bbc micro and get kids to learn about coding... no and it barely even got them to learn about Linux or some low level OS stuff.

matpower · May 29, 2020

64bitmodels said:
Literally no one uses a Pi for anything other than emulation, and even then Pi emulatiors are a big niche

You are underestimating it, it is a great low power option to host your own services. I'm running Jellyfin and Gitea on mine and I'm almost moving my work laptop's local hosted webserver+database to my Pi3 (I need to write a Dockerfile first, work's doing things old school).

the_randomizer · May 29, 2020

I just wished the Pi was powerful enough for more accurate SNES and PSX emulation instead of relying on cores that have inferior audio emulation. Just saying. That, and full speed for SA-1, Super FX games.

cracker · May 29, 2020

Unfortunately, the SBCs that have that power seem to be lacking support unless their main goal was as an emulation system in the first place. Sure you can port most of it (if the system is open enough for the media engine, etc is exposed for devs), but I would rather have an established homebrew community for the device and not have to tweak code to get things working right. I only use my Rpi 3 and 3+ for video streaming and zero W for handheld emulation, but there are so many uses for them ex: webserving, NAS, data logging, home security, interactive displays, led controlling, 3D print/router/etcher controlling, RC projects....

Tom Bombadildo · May 29, 2020

cracker said:
Unfortunately, the SBCs that have that power seem to be lacking support unless their main goal was as an emulation system in the first place. Sure you can port most of it (if the system is open enough for the media engine, etc is exposed for devs), but I would rather have an established homebrew community for the device and not have to tweak code to get things working right. I only use my Rpi 3 and 3+ for video streaming and zero W for handheld emulation, but there are so many uses for them ex: webserving, NAS, data logging, home security, interactive displays, led controlling, 3D print/router/etcher controlling, RC projects....

Exactly this. There are tons of SBCs that are a much better value hardware-wise than any Raspberry Pi on the market, and you can list them until your blue in the face...but every single one has basically none of the long term official/widespread community support that the Pi has/will have. I've yet to see a single SBC, or line of SBC, with support like the Pi has, and that's the main reason everyone and their grandma who likes to use SBC opt to use them instead of "better" alternatives.

I've got Pi's for days because they can do so much thanks to the community, I got one running as a NAS for media streaming, one for emulation, 2 as a media box, another in a handheld, a Pi for Pi Hole, I have a Pi that I'm now planning to use for monitoring my security cams...there's no way I could buy multiples of another SBC to support all of these things easily that would be supported for years to come.

FAST6191 · May 29, 2020

the_randomizer said:
I just wished the Pi was powerful enough for more accurate SNES and PSX emulation instead of relying on cores that have inferior audio emulation. Just saying. That, and full speed for SA-1, Super FX games.

Are you ever likely to get the masses on board with your quest for pitch perfect audio recreation? You can find a game with timing that got messed up but anybody that played the originals probably played it on a CRT (possibly even a mono one) with a speaker better than what we have on flatscreens today (speakers like space/size and 2cm in the bottom of a solid box is anything but) but still not good, and anybody playing it for the first time is unlikely to either notice or if they do likely dismiss it as a quirk as all things sound bleepy-bloopy compared to the 9000 channels at silly sample rates that everything has now.

My hearing is shot and musical talent not much better but I do at least occasionally wander around the likes of HCS64 and the game audio plugins for foobar and what have you, seeing the discussions about how this chip actually had say 3 levels of audio decay rather than assuming a linear one like we have today. I grab examples and most of the time I can't even tell, even my scope or waveform analysis says I should (my hearing really is that bad) and it is not just someone trying to be a golden ear. Even when they do sound different then none of them particularly offend my ear -- it is not like they clip with all that such a thing brings or otherwise bring unnecessary noise, more that the buzz sounds different but is still a buzz of the right frequency and yeah it is a different decay but the same pattern is there and still has a pumping beat as I run around beating up more people than most people could count.

wiewiec · May 29, 2020

I do not know why most of you are criticizes this... I never use Pi for emulation, but I know that not bad doing this... Pi 4 have Lakka for some time and have not bad emulation of Dreamcast. I have 4 gig Pi4 bought used for cheap to build audio DAC. When I bought used Pi4 with 4GB RAM, with case, 16GB card, power adapter I paid around 45 euro. Now every one have game controller etc. Not bad deal if some one wanna start with emulation.

matpower · May 29, 2020

cracker said:
Unfortunately, the SBCs that have that power seem to be lacking support unless their main goal was as an emulation system in the first place. Sure you can port most of it (if the system is open enough for the media engine, etc is exposed for devs), but I would rather have an established homebrew community for the device and not have to tweak code to get things working right. I only use my Rpi 3 and 3+ for video streaming and zero W for handheld emulation, but there are so many uses for them ex: webserving, NAS, data logging, home security, interactive displays, led controlling, 3D print/router/etcher controlling, RC projects....

Given that even the Pi isn't using a mainline kernel, I think the point is moot. If it runs Armbian, I would say it is good enough, and if it runs on mainline (even if lacking features), decent. So far, Pi(s) and Odroids have a somewhat working mainline support, RockPro64 can do mainline too. If you are using them headless, mainline is viable since you are usually missing GPU hardware acceleration and sound shenanigans.

Tom Bombadildo said:
I've got Pi's for days because they can do so much thanks to the community, I got one running as a NAS for media streaming, one for emulation, 2 as a media box, another in a handheld, a Pi for Pi Hole, I have a Pi that I'm now planning to use for monitoring my security cams...there's no way I could buy multiples of another SBC to support all of these things easily that would be supported for years to come.

Everything you mentioned can run anywhere else. NAS can be set up in other boards (some of them do it better thanks to built-in SATA/PCI interfaces), emulation is also fine (See: batocera.linux, also runs on Pi), media boxes also work (LibreELEC is well supported. Pi also had notorious issues with hardware acceleration until the Pi4), and Pi Hole runs anywhere you can run Debian/Ubuntu or Docker, including a bog standard x86 PC. None of those specifically require a Pi, it is basic system administration/power user usage. The only difference between the Pi or another SBC/x86 SSF is that you google "Pi X" instead of "how to set X up" and get some untrusted oneliner command like "curl shadyurl.here/totallysafescript.sh | sudo bash" instead of actual proper instructions.

I concede on handheld though, the older Pi models have a lot of flexibility on cases and IMO the only thing that comes close to a handheld Pi is Odroid Go Advance, which is always out of stock :whip:

or those Ingenic MIPS handhelds like the RG350 but they can't do anything further that PSX.

TheZander · May 29, 2020

Most RPis i have bought so absolutely nothing when i turn them on others I've seen a raspberry thing and then text on the screen. These things are absolutely boring i don't get why they need sprucing up they practically do nothing but turn on. Sure it has usb ports but why would i need this contraption just to charge my phone? The Pi community astounds me what god is a computer if it didn't do anything

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