OGST question

[Magroc]

I have an Odroid which I bought 3 years ago and I'm considering installing OGST. I have basic knowledge about OGST, someone could correct me if OGST is the same as Emulation Station on Retropie? I am also wondering if has been updated to the latest version? One last question, which is the best 16GB eMMC, the red or the orange?

[meveric]

OGST is very dated by now, and while parts of it are still updated every now and then, it is far from being recent.
It was developed long before images like Retropie were available for ODROIDs and was more of an all in one image, Linux Desktop, with browser, Video Player support, which you can use as a normal desktop image, but also with all the common emulators installed and configured to work.
Which is somewhat different from other images like retropie which focused on mainly emulators alone and only later started to add additional features.
EmulationStation is just a frontend not an image, not an emulator.
eMMC Orange won't work on the XU4 you need a Red one.

[Magroc]

Thank you meveric for your reply. Would you mind letting me know whether OGST makes use of Retroarch? Can Install the latest Retropie on Odroid XU4?

[meveric]

OGST uses retroarch for most emulators, there are some exception like DreamCast, Nintendo 64, Amiga, PlayStation Portable and some other emulators, which are their own emulators instead of retroarch with libretro cores.

I'm not aware of the status of Retropie for XU4 you would have to check that yourself on their homepage.

[bwareca]

Sorry to respond to an old thread here, but I think this is relevant.

Meveric, first of all, thank you for the unbelievable work you've done for this community.

I've been looking for a suitable N2+ OS to run my wxpython-based front end along with well optimized emulators, especially for the N64, and so far I've been striking out. The Hardkernel-provided Ubuntu image has had terrible performance running emulators after using Retropie's installation script (I imagine GPU driver issues?), your latest brilliant Debian Bullseye doesn't seem to work well with that approach (kernel panics when trying to run retroarch), and I've been struggling to find anything similar for the N2+.

I understand that OGST has essentially been mothballed, but it seems to have been pretty ideal for my use case. I tried installing the latest OGSTA from your site (oph.mdrjr.net/meveric/images/OGSTA/), but that fails to boot. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious there.

Is there any particular approach that you would advise? My goal is simply and only high end, as-close-to-perfect-as-possible emulation for the N64 along with support for my wxpython front end.

Thank you!

[meveric]

The OGSTA image was only for the ODROID GO2/GO3 series of boards and won't run on the N2+

I haven't tried retroarch on Debian Bullseye yet, which wouldn't be required for N64 anyway as you would normally use muppen64plus emulator directly anyway as you use a lot of performance using retroarch with retroarch cores.
I will try to see what I need to do to get muppen64pus to work on Debian Bullseye and come back to you with my findings.

[bwareca]

Amazing, thank you so much for your consideration here.

I must have read incorrectly that OGSTA was intended for the N2 and N2+.

This may be a janky approach, but I've used retroarch for similar projects in the past (Raspberry Pi based). It was helpful because I could use multiple emulators with pretty unified settings and configuration files (which would be rewritten per game right before launching the retroarch cores from my own front end), and it worked nicely. My intention with the N2+ is to have enough horsepower to run everything from in the N64 library as perfectly as possible.

I don't think any of this would require Debian 11. Would you recommend using an earlier OS version instead?

Thanks again for everything!

[meveric]

I've uploaded a version of mupen64plus, which can be installed via:

Code: Select all

apt install mupen64plus-odroid

it's the emulator itself and the cores used to run it.
Under /usr/local/share/mupen64plus/ you can find mupen64plus.cfg which is a good basis to start using the emulator.
It comes with a couple of different graphics cores.
Rice, is probably the fastest but has some graphical issues here and there.
gliden64mk2 is a very good all-rounder good performance and very little graphical issues
GLideN64 is the most modern of the graphics cores with lots of features, like high resolution texture pack support and things like that.
It's not as fast as the others but very accurate.
It depends greatly on the games which core is the best in which situation.

Regarding your question.. While the N2+ is a power house, not all N64 games will run perfectly fine.
N64 was never running perfect on ARM hardware.

If switching to a different OS would help, I don't know.
Only Debian 11 support X11, so if your application is X based, other OS version will not work, as they only have closed source fbdev GPU drivers.

[bwareca]

Thanks again for taking a look at this!

Unfortunately it doesn't look like the emulator is working with any of the graphics cores. I've tried everything I know to do, but no video initializes at all. Maybe a graphics driver issue?

My ultimate goal is to have something in a small form factor that can play any N64 US release as well as possible, with my wxpython-based GUI driving it. Is there something inherently inferior about ARM, and if so would something x86 likely work better for this purpose?

Thanks again for all you do

[meveric]

I've tested the emulator before I uploaded it, so I know it's working.
Most likely it's either a wrong configuration or as you mentioned you're using the wrong GPU drivers/environment to test it.

Overall x86 is far better for emulation of N64 than ARM as x86 outperforms ARM boards..
That doesn't mean you can't get a decent performance on an ARM board either, but it still stands that an x86 based system normally has higher performance.