New Raspberry Pi 4

Questions about the RaspberryJAMMA adapter.

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dee2eR
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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by dee2eR » Thu Jun 27, 2019 11:09 pm

I'm guessing the 1gig will have it's limitations, depending on what you want out of it it could be fine though. It's hard to speculate further without the hardware but the 1gig Pi3A+ has some trouble with ram hungry Attract layouts and decompressing large 1gig+ compressed files. It would be nice if the 1gig works well though as it keeps the price of RPi4 about the same as RPi3B+.

Similarly, I'm not certain the extra 2 gig of ram the 4 gig model has will be that useful, although as time passes I'm sure it will become more so. If you made me pick just one right now I'd say get the 2 gig unless you don't mind spending that little bit extra and possibly not getting any more out of it. Actually, my current advice is hold off until we know more... there are too many things I don't have answers to yet.

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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by mR_CaESaR » Mon Jul 01, 2019 11:17 pm

Really looking forward to seeing if the pi4 will work with the current raspberryjamma.

I think the pi4 will be a game changer - especially if it handles Naomi/atomiswave and cave sh3 :)

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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by MarkOZLAD » Mon Jul 01, 2019 11:38 pm

Second hdmi output for a marquee?

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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by dee2eR » Tue Jul 02, 2019 2:08 pm

I wondered about the digital marquee possibilities too. Also makes 2 screen stuff like Punchout, PC10, Run and Gun etc a possibility (maybe, not saying it can do anything yet - having two outputs may work but gaming on two outputs may be too much for the thing, who knows).

As far as Naomi stuff goes there's no emulator available that I'm aware of. Hopefully that changes, or I'm just wrong about it entirely.

I've also realized the 1 gig model is probably fine, it's the 512 meg Pi3A+ that struggle with some stuff (I lost perspective on RAM working on an old i7 recently, 1 gig is fine for Pi3 at the moment why wouldn't it be for Pi4... I'm dumb). I jumped the gun saying the base model Pi4 may not be good enough... I assume it will probably work fine. I guess I should get one of them too.

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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by buverman » Wed Jul 03, 2019 12:52 pm

Something like this would be fantastic!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTg7XHteBTE&t=439s

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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by FrizzleFried » Wed Jul 03, 2019 2:26 pm

Just to give folks a little perspective...

... people are having trouble getting ATTRACT-MODE to work on the Pi4.

It sounds to me as if ARpiCADE Pi4 support is going to take a little more than a small tweak ala the Pi3B+ upgrade... but even this is just conjecture.
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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by dee2eR » Tue Jul 09, 2019 3:16 am

So far mixed results....

I recieved my first Pi4 yesterday, ordered a 1 gig from a reseller at a premium as E14 are useless (I'm still annoyed they changed the ETA after I paid for my Pi4s, generally their service is actually amazing). Updating ARpiCADE 3.84 to run on Pi4 was surprisingly straight forward but then I hit issues with the video output. I could tell the Pi4 was running because of the LEDs but the monitor I was using wasn't recognizing a signal, turns out the HDMI micro adaptor I had was faulty, a new one fixed it up.

I can confirm the new VideoCore VI can still do low res output, although I've only checked 480i so far... I can also confirm the 2 amp fuse on the RaspberryJAMMA should be OK for Pi4, I'm powering mine off a Pi3 power supply with a USB type c adaptor and there's no sign of the dreaded low power lightning bolt (but i bet I'd see it if I plug in a USB3 HDD or similar power hungry device). SDL1.2 programs seem to work fine, at least the ones I've tried.

On to the less good news, Attract-Mode doesn't get along with the new VideoCore, neither does MAME 0.172 (I didn't check but I think MAME 0.203 too). Both programs will run on Pi4 but do not put an image on screen using the legacy video driver and won't run using the new hardware accelerated one (EDIT: without X11). The exact same SD card into a Pi3B+ and it all works fine so it's a video driver and OpenGL problem causing the issue. I haven't tried Retroarch stuff yet, had to remove quite a bit to update the software to the newest Raspbian Buster due to space constraints, I'll get there too.... The new VideoCore VI also doesn't currently support a couple of features that were good about the VideoCore IV like the pixel perfect overscan control, should be fixed in time with newer drivers though - I hope). Also the splash image is currently broken, on all Pis, I haven't looked into it at all yet.

Interestingly, it looks like the new version of ARpiCADE may support Pi1 variations again including Pi Zero for the first time too (I never actually got a Pi Zero as they were unobtainium in Australia when I was interested in one - it's the only RPi I haven't tried I think). Of course I wouldn't recommend running a Pi1 these days, they were OK with the hacked MAME4All and FBA versions in early ARpiCADE but those have been gone for a while now (and due to HDD failure a couple of years ago I don't even know if I have the old source code with the mods I'd made - it's probably still on the oldest versions of ARpiCADE with the software though). Again, I do not recommend the earliest Pi versions for arcade use in 2019, they were OK five years ago - obviously better Pis have come since then.

It may not sound like it but I'm pretty happy with the progress made so far. Believe it or not the Pi3B+ was no easier to do the update for. Less issues with emulators and more trouble trying to make it boot properly... plus it took me two releases to get WiFi working on it. The Pi3A+ update went very smoothly, probably because no-one cared... lol.

Anyway, I better get back to it....

EDIT: have discovered some things that make me less excited about Pi4.... at least for now, long term it can all be fixed up with some more mature drivers/software. VC6 is too new at the moment (VC5 may have been a better choice but I don't know the ins and outs of Broadcom so maybe VC5 was flawed in some way). Running the accelerated video mode you cannot use low res output, you can set it but the system reverts to 480p. Running the legacy video mode you can do low res out but it has it's own issues.

Attract-Mode can be run in X11, but not in the terminal without X11 like we use it on all the other Pis. The overhead of X11 makes it undesirable to do it this way. Same is true of newer MAMEs I think.

For now I'm going to move on to checking out other bits and pieces. Worst comes I can make Advance Menu run for Pi4 and leave Attract-Mode for earlier models til things improve. Bit dissapointing to have to use older and less impressive looking software on the newer hardware.

I knew VC4 wouldn't be used forever but it does have some really good points in it favour, it's just not a very modern video solution. If they had reused it I'd probably be uploading new software already. A little bit dissapointed VC6 doesn't have more legacy VC4 compatibility, hopefully it can be added.

@FrizzleFried
I think you were right in the end, not a simple update. Too much new hardware involved...
Last edited by dee2eR on Tue Jul 09, 2019 5:23 am, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: More info / update

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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by Cjoli » Tue Jul 09, 2019 12:28 pm

Thanks for the update dee2eR, regarding the attract-mode stuff, I would assume they would probably update that on their end eventually, that might fix those issues?

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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by FrizzleFried » Tue Jul 09, 2019 7:19 pm

Thanks for the update. I am sure with a little time all will work out... in the meantime I'll probably just pick up a Pi4 for when it does end up working.

Hopefully the folks at attract-mode are working on getting their software working with Pi4.
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Re: New Raspberry Pi 4

Post by Cjoli » Wed Jul 10, 2019 10:19 pm

I am not expecting huge changes from the Pi4 but I hope its just enough to get things in the more current versions of MAME to run better, like Donkey Kong, also the FBA (NeoGeo) stuff.

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