Review: Overclocking the Raspberry Pi 3 for RetroPie

we're back folks talking about the Raspberry Pi yet again for this episode we're gonna talk about how overclocking could help out the more complicated emulation on the software called a retro PI if you have no idea what I'm talking about you can watch my previous video on the retro PI but here's the short version the Raspberry Pi is one of the smallest and cheapest computers you can buy and people have done a lot with it one of those things is turning it into an emulation machine where you can play emulators of the most loved retro systems the original Raspberry Pi wasn't the best for this purpose but the third and most powerful version does extremely well Game Boy Advance Super Nintendo and the PlayStation one to name a few played a pretty damn amazing and it has become my go-to machine to play and record retro games here's a few let's play is on my channel if you want to get a better look of the retro Pi in action the machine does have its barriers though as the Nintendo 64 just couldn't run on the device as reliably as the other emulators add that to my next video where I tried to run DSPs p and dreamcast games and the PSP and dreamcast had some games that ran mostly fine and others had horrible frame rates that made it impossible to play so while I still think the PI is fantastic it's not a replacement for a modern PC still it works nice as an all-in-one retro gaming box for your TV or monitor and to me it's a must-have for convenience alone huh that wasn't short at all and now we're here most people would have given up after they found out that the Nintendo 64 PSP and Dreamcast don't work that well but gamers don't give up so easily there's another way to get more power out of your pi and that's overclocking like usual here are the timestamps on the screen and in the description if you want to skip I recommend you watch this video all the way to not miss any details but for returning viewers who are using this as a guide here's a nice little skip for you all the first part of the video will be on how to overclock the device and the second part will be using my best settings for the Nintendo 64 PSP and Dreamcast and then I'll be telling you guys whether I think it's worth it if you've never heard of overclocking then you're probably not tech savvy enough to try this but I can at least try explaining it overclocking is making your computer hardware run faster than its recommended speed to get a better performance obviously going above the recommended settings means there are drawbacks the hardware being overclocked will get hotter so your PC might need a powerful fan to keep it from overheating it will also cause the hardware to degrade faster so you might not want to overclock if your hardware is close to last you long term which is usually the reason I've never over locked any of my computers I use my last computer pearls five years and I couldn't justify the price of another computer before then but who honestly cares when it comes to overclocking the Raspberry Pi three it's a thirty dollar machine not a 200 dollar processor if it breaks you can literally use the same case power supply SD card and attachments with a new Pi 3 and nothing should be different well mostly nothing so when people are talking about overclocking they're probably talking about CPUs and GPUs and that's what we will be overclocking on the PI today now if you're ready to do some overclocking and getting your previously unplayable games working today then you might need to check your expectations so the biggest problem is that the max speeds you get from overclocking each PI 3 aren't the same my original one actually had stability issues so I had to buy another PI that could get the speeds I wanted so my PI 3 that I test today could have better or worse speeds than years at home because of that I wanted to test out the base PI in my previous video to not give off the impression every PI could achieve the same result seen here so anything you see run better in this video will have the warning that you might not be able to achieve the same results I'd wait until a PI 4 comes out if these emulators working well is a deciding factor for you if you're happy with the retro PI but would also like to try to get more out of it then let's continue on I want to break this down as much as I can for people who honestly don't know anything so before we can mess with our settings I'm going to show you the basic knowledge and hardware you need for overclocking overclocking used to be a very simple process on previous raspberry PI's you could just go into the raspberry pi configuration select overclocking and pick which one that fitted your needs if you try to do that with a Raspberry Pi 3 though you'll find out that overclocking isn't supported don't freak out though as this is normal the reason for this is that the previous PI's don't have the same issues with overclocking as the Raspberry Pi 3 such as instability this was sadly the case for my original PI 3 as just barely overclocking cause stuttering even on the menu to overclock all you need is the ability to edit the config files to do this from the retro PI plug in a keyboard and push ctrl + f4 to get to this screen from here you can run commands and check the PI's temperature to access the config files you'll need to type in sudo space nano space ford slash boot ford slash config dot txt now it is open and ready to be chained to save any changes you need to press ctrl + X and then press Y to confirm changes and enter to save the config after this type sudo space reboot to reboot the device you will need to know how to do this on your PC to put the SD card you are using for your PI into your PC some have SD card readers built-in but if not just get a cheap little SD card to USB device open the driver in no windows I don't want to format this device off first copy or config dot txt file to your PC if anything happens and you can't figure out how to fix it you can just copy it back here in the future now to edit this file you can just right click and open it from your notepad however it's all scrunched to the corner in one big line so I recommend downloading notepad plus plus which is free and it will space everything out properly just make sure you save before you move files over then rename it config txt I like to do quick edits to the config on the PI and edit on the PC when there are settings I want to have a copy of or when my PI won't start yeah if you fly too close to the Sun your PI might not boot up all the way after a restart since you can't even get to the right screen to run console commands you will need to edit the config files in the PC or some other way that doesn't involve the PI now I have been told that holding shift down on a keyboard when the PI is booting will revert the PI back to some non overclocking settings my tests failed to show this as my game still had the improvements from overclocking but maybe it only works when the PI won't boot all the way now that we have the technical knowledge we just have to make sure the PI itself doesn't overheat here's the PI 3 itself in all its glory the CPU is the large chip in the middle of the board and the GPU is the smaller chip located further right if you bought a PI 3 with a starter kit you more than likely got these things to put on your chips their heat sinks that draw heat out of the CPU and GPU to help disperse it from the chip on the bottom of it is basically like a thermal paste and tape form to help it draw heat to the heatsink I put mine on my normal PI just to make sure it doesn't overheat from normal use but for this video I personally got this 5 dollar set for my new Pi 3 the heat sinks have more dispersion so I can cool off easier and a copper piece to put on the bottom of the CPU too honestly I would have never thought to do that the other item we will need is a fan most 5 volt PC fans might help but you'll have to run it through the 5 volt GPIO pins the GPIO pins are the pins on the device where you can hook up extra hardware you can go online and look up which one does what on the pi3 the first three on the right column will be for your fan the first to supply power and the third one will be the ground if your fan only has two pins just make sure the side with the black wire connects to the third pin also pay attention to the size of your fans plug as my old case van couldn't fit right away to get it working you're going to want to position the fan on the top of your PI so it sucks the hot air from the device luckily I went nuts for this and got myself a $15.00 USB thermal take two I bought mine at Fry's Electronics but you can buy them on Amazon or other online retailers this thing sounds like a freaking helicopter but at the same time it also has a knob so I can turn the speed down I'm not sure if it's even a good idea to put this thing on top of the pie so I just have it face it instead I just bought this for a simple USB solution I wouldn't be surprised if some people don't want to mess with these pins and would rather just use a USB fan and I wanted to show people an option that worked well it though well apparently people use this thing to keep other electronic devices cool so yes as much as this is overkill for what I need I'm sure I'll get more use out of this in the future now I wouldn't just stick with the heatsinks or just a fan when it comes to overclocking maybe the Thermaltake but using both a fan and heat sinks at the same time will prevent most if any overheating I'd also keep the top of your case off so the heat isn't trapped if that doesn't sound ideal for your setup you can buy cases with fans installed and they aren't that expensive and just make sure the heat sinks you get will fit in the case too if you just plan on overclocking now and again I can recommend what I'm doing if you plan to keep your PI overclock for good then go with the case that has a built-in fan speaking of temperatures the temperatures of your cores won't be noticeable unless you exit out of your game and go into the command line it should immediately have the temperature on the top area but you can also check it again with the line V CGEN CMD measure underscore temp there is a way to make a sensor for your PI so you can know the temperature constantly but I'm not about making and coding something like that I'm just testing one pie and then shelving it unless I need overclocking for a future video the temperature of your PI meaning the CPU and or GPU should not be going over eighty degrees as a warning the PI will actually display an image of a thermometer on the top right corner of the screen when it gets over eighty degrees this means you need to turn the PI off and start using a fan or heatsink if you aren't already if the PI gets over 85 degrees you'll get a similar picture but the thermometer filled up if it doesn't fry by that point the pie will usually start to throttle the speeds to keep the device cool but as long as you're using a heatsink and fan you shouldn't have to see these the only time I saw one was the 80-degree picture when I was testing my pie with only my fan on low speeds it never got too hot during mild overclocking settings with n64 games but when I decided to update the device which took a while I saw the picture and immediately used my fans top speed to keep it cool until it was done updating updating in case you were curious too the only other picture for the pi3 is one of a lightning bolt which means the pie is underpowered and you need a better power supply I actually got this a few times when we're starting my device after moving files over from a USB stick I thought it might have been my wireless outlet but after extensive testing it went away after I took a break take that for what you will and those are the tools we need to have a No so let's overclock this thing so the base power of your PI 3 is as follows the arm frequency is 1200 megahertz the core frequency is 400 megahertz the GPU is 300 and the RAM is 450 megahertz now the GPU setting actually affects a bunch of settings by itself like v3d isp and h.264 also the overclocking section of github strongly recommended that the GPU and core settings stay the same for better results some other places say it also sets the core to but I don't think it does from my personal tests and I would just set the core frequency as well to play it safe so as long as you aren't unlucky a Raspberry Pi 3 should be able to get 13 hundred megahertz out of the arm in five hundred from both the core and GPU if you can't even get that far without seeing some instability issues then try increasing the over voltage by one level until it fixes things the highest you can go by the way is six you can go higher by forcing turbo which maxes all of your PI 3 settings constantly even on the menu however this will void your warranty on the device if that worries you also if the temperature of your PI goes over 85 degrees celsius it will void your warranty as well I won't use force turbo because it seems impractical and not for constant use so in the config file we want to scroll down to arm frequency ignore what this comment says - that's for the older PI also just for a quick coding lesson when someone says to comment something that means put the hashtag or pound symbol as the very first character in the line doing this makes the program treat the following line is just text getting rid of the line is called surprise surprise uncommenting so the program will treat it as code and run it also do not capitalize any code some languages will let you but linux-based ones like the pie will not so keep it underscore nothing we write should have spaces either so make sure you write the code exactly how I am or else these won't work uncomment this line and put in twelve hundred and fifty instead of 800 it's recommended when you test your pie speed you go up 50 at a time so we know the limits of the pie right away if we try to jump to thirteen hundred and fifty or something we may not realize that our pie can only go up to twelve hundred and fifty and it won't start you don't have to do this and can just jump straight to the settings you desire but I still recommend this so you know if your pie is properly cooling before you start throwing major work on it now restart the device so we can see how it's running if it's acting unstable like visually glitchy even at the menu then up the voltage to do this type over underscore voltage equals two and go up until it's fixed if the voltage is at six and it doesn't get better than sad to say it but that's as far as you go same thing if the device won't boot up at all that means your pie is at its limits with whatever settings you try to increase if it's running just fine then let's start working on the GPU and CPU so underneath the arm code write GPU underscore F req equals 400 and CPU underscore F req equals 400 again it's recommended you keep these the same for better results and personally my tests were better when both were kept the same now boot your device and see how it runs so not all settings will help every emulator the same the Nintendo 64 does better with increasing the GPU as it uses plugins and relies on OpenGL the arm is going to help the main memory later is name doesn't use 3d acceleration and relies on the CPU I think this is because MAME has software based 3d games and doesn't really use a graphics card but I could be wrong also when it comes to the Nintendo 64 you will also want to edit the code near the bottom GPU underscore meam underscore 124 apparently you want to set that equal from 256 to 512 for nintendo 64 malaysian and 320 for other emulators to help games that use the GPU more now to increase the ram we will set the ram higher by adding SDRAM underscore F req equals 500 if you need to you can increase voltage to ram to help ability add sdram underscore / underscore voltage equals two but I never had issues with it so I didn't add it to mine some other places might recommend more settings but honestly I got the best results by changing these however if you found other settings helped you out more please leave them in the comments below feel free to post a link to show your videos as well now you can look elsewhere than github to get good advice on what to add and change for better results I personally like this reddit post by hot Tabasco sauce dedicated to overclocking for nintendo 64 games this really got my hopes up for a Nintendo 64 emulation in the comments he also talks about having no lag in a lot of notable games like the three mario parties Smash Bros Goldeneye and Bomberman which are usually really bad however I can't say I got anywhere near the same results with his settings Mario Party 1 & 3 are good but 2 is horrible Bomberman is actually good Smash Bros lags a bit and Goldeneye still chugs he also posted a video on YouTube showing off the first level in Goldeneye and while it's so much better than what we had before no lag is debatable especially since he can't run and gun thanks to holding his camera and you can't really stress test Goldeneye with one hand I'm not calling him a liar or anything I just think there's some differing opinions on what lag is here and I want to warn people so they don't get their hopes up like I did I believe even a little lag is still lag even if the game is still playable however there is still the difference between playable lag and unplayable lag and what that is for some people is a completely subjective matter so am i pi the best speeds I got were armed is 1400 GPU and CPU are 600 SDRAM is 500 and v3d is 500 the arm CPU and GPU seem to be above average and the SDRAM is pretty average for overclocking speeds so hopefully that means I can get some pretty decent results for overclocking games today the v3d however which helps the nintendo 64 had to be set to 500 separately or else it caused my PI to become unstable it sucks but at least it's still the average overclocking speed and that's as much as I can really inform you on overclocking this device sorry if I missed anything helpful or important I'm new to this as much as some of you coming to this video are but I believe I got the basics and hopefully I could help some of you with beginner problems and I want to again thank the retro PI information on github and the reddit poster hot Tabasco sauce for his post really help me understand how overclocking worked real quick while making this video there has been the release of a new Pi 3 model called the Raspberry Pi 3 model B+ there have been some hardware upgrades to the system for things like dual band Wi-Fi Bluetooth 4.2 and faster Ethernet however the only real difference to retropie fans is the processor being a whopping point 2 gigahertz faster than the original for a total of 1.4 gigahertz which if you were paying attention is the same processing speed as my overclocked PI today there has been no change to the GPU however so n64 games will not see an increase in playability I've also read that the processors they are using might be the same as the PI 3 model be they just got good enough and making the chips that they can consistently get it to 1.4 gigahertz if that is the case then we might not be able to overclock it much further which adds to the whole getting lucky to find a good pi to overclock and my personal opinion if you already have a PI 3 model feed then there's no real reason to upgrade for the retro PI no change to the GPU makes it a hard sell for us unless you know that that extra point 2 gigahertz CPU will work for your desired games I just can't recommend it if you don't have a PI 3 then feel free to buy it it looks like it's the same price as the PI 3 model B so you don't have anything to lose now back to you originally scheduled YouTube video ok okay we got the explaining out of the way but who will even want to overclock this thing if they don't know if it can actually help and if it does how well will it help obviously we don't need to go back over every emulator on the retro PI so we will mostly go over all the systems I previously covered that had a lot of issues the system's being reviewed again but with blast proccesing will be the PSP Dreamcast in Nintendo 64 so first we're gonna tackle solutions I was informed of to help emulation mostly for the Nintendo 64 but this could help out other systems too so I wanted to bring it up now I got a lot of people giving me advice when my first video talked about how the Nintendo 64 emulator was for a lot of people and 10 oh 64 games were a breaking point for them on buying the PI I got a few people who disagreed with me somehow on my opinion that Nintendo 64 games didn't work that well funny enough going back to these games on the PI I can honestly say some games like Mario and Zelda were actually worse than I remember the first solution was using an SD card with a higher class speed and had better read and write speeds for the puck this kind of makes sense says Nintendo 64 games were still using cartridges while other companies were using CDs they had less space but lo times were non-existent most of the time so mimicking this with an SD card could help the SD cards have numbers in the bottom quarter of the card and they tell you it's class feed one four six and ten with a circle around them as what we're used to with ten being the fastest now you might see a number inside of a U and that's basically the same speed as a class ten with a circle even a little bit better in my original video I believe my 16 gigabyte SD card had a class speed of four which isn't great but it still worked I was planning on getting another card anyway so I decided to get a Samsung 32 gigabyte Evo plus at one time this was considered to have the best read and write speeds for the PI two and now it's like the fifth best for Pi threes if you're wondering where the card is considered better than the 64 gigabyte version the reason is the more space you have to dig through the more time the device has to spend to find the information which makes sense just know slow and fast aren't going to seem like that big of a difference even if this doesn't really work I now have better read and write speeds so I'm still happy I've been using this SD card since my experimental emulators review and I'm pretty happy with it though I can't tell of any big changes in the Nintendo 64 emulator the second advice I got was to use a power supply with more voltage so the pi3 needs a 5 volt 2.5 a power supply now I originally wrote this off because the pi motherboard can only use 5 volts at a time and adding more power would only be good if you're charging devices from the usb I use a wireless controller and the only thing plugged into the USB is the Wii U pro controller adapter and now the fan so I'm not taking that much power from the PI 3 however it is possible that even without using extenders the PI is losing some voltage along the cable which could mess with the emulation I've only ever seen the under voltage sign after messing with some settings with and without overclocking but it went away with no rhyme or reason technically more power could help though my only issue with it is that I haven't seen any proof that this could be the cause for some emulation being bogged down you would think with all the tests this easy fix would have more results so while I'm not writing it off I also won't be using it in today's video if anybody has results that can prove that a larger power supply that gets the PI to a full 5 volts decreases these problems feel free to post them but without proof I'm going to say they didn't help any more than the SD card did so I actually left out something from the first review of the Nintendo 64 I was in numb nuts and didn't talk about how the PI has different plugins you can run the same way you can run different emulators on other games so just keep tapping a after you select the game and it will bring you to this screen here you can run different plugins for each game that could possibly show better results for some games I believe this was the only way I got bomberman 64 to work at all in my original review which i did say but never really explained it to make a long story short though immediately after i was told this i tested every game i tested in the video with every plugin to shorten this part up glide is the best plugin and works for most games by giving them the most authentic Nintendo 64 look sometimes other plugins work better but that's with graphical issues that aren't too fun to look at usually you'll find horrible problems like being invisible glitchy screens and odd effects sometimes my PI crash to the point I had to cut the power which happened on Mario Golf and Pokemon Stadium in my opinion to stick with glide unless it has some horrible glitch that makes it unplayable for the PSP I didn't realize that there was a non LR emulator people could run to try to get faster emulation from it you will have to download it from the retro PI setup but hey it's another option the thing is there are a lot of technical things you can mess with on this emulator most non LR emulators will have less options but this one has a lot more to change at first I wrote it off but after finding the right settings to change it's actually better I'll go more into it when we do the PSP for the last of the information I should explain that the retro PI runs most Nintendo 64 plugins in 240p and then scales them to 720p this means that they're running in a super small screen that should make it easier for the PI to emulate and just upscaled into something our TVs like and won't introduce any input lag with which is why jaggies are all over the models and plugins like Glide other ones usually the high-res version of the plugins run them at a higher resolution it looks better but it will lag more and possibly have graphical problems you can also change the settings to make some games run at a different resolution and hurts if you want a non 240p plug-in to run at a smaller resolution though you might just want to do that from the config file settings especially if you want to go super retro and use your pie with a CRT so let's look at how each game on the Nintendo 64 is improved with the help of overclocking alright so Mario 64 was one of those games I thought was perfect beforehand but it turns out the second star has a lag spike in the beginning and I felt much more lag going to the level as fast as possible the lag is still playable in the original but I decided to use this game to test my speed slowly the lack spike gradually got better and with my final settings you can barely feel it and the rest of the level feels lag free testing out some other levels I can say any lag is dismissible and that the game is fully playable as far as I played into it Zelda Ocarina of Time had much more lag than I remember especially when fighting enemies but with overclocking it still had lag spikes and a little lag with enemies and picking up objects but after that it was pretty solid Super Smash Bros was horrible without overclocking and with it it's not terrible but it's playable if you want to play with yourself it should be said that multiplayer on the Nintendo 64 is possible but causes much more lag than multiplayer on other emulators so sadly no four player party games with this device which is sad because mario party 1 and 3 played incredibly well after overclocking but 2 suffers from way too much lag Mario Kart is honestly just fine without overclocking but with it I can't see I ran into any problems besides a few graphical hiccups Pokemon Stadium suffered from the narrator's voice being super glitchy so I had to turn it off but after that it was super good though I don't think I can live without Ted Lewis Paper Mario suffered from too many graphical problems and after you get the star points it lags like crazy making it unplayable for me Mario Golf booted me straight to the pie menu when I started to golf so there's that Kirby 64 I swear played worse when I first used overclocking with it but after playing it on my old Pi 3 again and for much longer than 1 level it honestly feels fine cutscenes still don't have the border around them though Donkey Kong 64 also played just fine like before probably even a little faster bomberman 64 ran pretty damn good but sometimes it felt a little too fast and it doesn't display gold cards at the end of each level the second attack is alright but I honestly don't feel like it was affected by overclocking at all Duke Nukem 64 played just fine before and still plays just fine now and last but not least Goldeneye it does lag at many points in the game but depending on your experience it might not be that bad it's hit or miss and honestly I only played the first level so other ones will no doubt vary and may make the game unplayable again still it is much more improved compared to before showing that the higher speeds are getting us some progress that was a lot of games but I'm happy I tested more games than I did last time if any of you are curious I did a stream of myself playing Nintendo 64 games while using these overclocking settings a while back so if you'd like to see them in action you can head on over to that video I also did a stream going through some Nintendo 64 games using every plugin I had at the time as well after all that is the Nintendo 64 of much better after overclocking with these settings yes it clearly shows itself either eliminating or mitigating lag in games where it was clearly there is it perfect incomparable to a modern-day PC no there are plenty of games where lag is still a problem and other games are clearly unplayable I can see why many people wanted me to try a bunch of different methods to help emulation but I can't just say that the emulation is fine when it clearly isn't the Nintendo 64 was half the reason I bought this device and I really wanted it to be perfect even after everything we did the fact is the PI doesn't have enough power yeah some games are good if not great but others aren't and there's nothing we can really do to fix that hopefully the next pipe model will get these games to either be perfect or just have playable lag until then we're stuck with what we got I'm not beating on the PI 3 the people who get these emulators to work or those trying to find every little thing to make games run better I'm just being realistic guys if a Nintendo 64 games working great is your selling point then the PI 3 is it for you you're more than likely gonna have to drop a hundred or even $200 on an emulation machine that can enough with being a downer though let's go over the dreamcast again I originally went over both sonic adventures Marvel vs. Capcom 2 and Tony Hawk pro skater 2 Tony Hawk and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 were good if just some minor problems but both sonic games had too much lag for me to consider them playable but how do they look now along with some new games that I played Sonic Adventure 1 & 2 still lag a bit during gameplay and have graphical problems but it's better and could be more playable now for some people Tony Hawk and Marvel vs. Capcom are the same as before so no complaints so for the new games I'm covering I'm not going to go over how they work without overclocking as I just want to show off what the best settings can do I've never played Crazy Taxi but I can say now that it seems like a lot of fun the compatibility list said that sound gets slower as time goes on but I personally didn't experience that the biggest issue is that when you start going at top speeds the game stutters like mad like it wasn't that bad while I was playing but thinking about it actually makes me nauseous sonic shuffle is a lot like Mario Party so I wanted to see how it worked the list said that it had issues and in the game it seems like it played fine there are graphical problems but it's tolerable in gameplay and for someone who hasn't played it before Oh Sonic your face can't catch a break gotta go fast in my nightmares so the cutscenes don't play even close to right I'd be more critical here but I'm just happy there isn't any lag or stuttering chu chu rocket seemed like it had some graphical problems but played just fine though my cursor moved constantly which bothered the hell out of me power stone - played really well didn't seem like it had any graphical issues and was fun as hell I've heard this game was a good one to play with friends and now I really want to need to get some net play for this thing the only problem I had is that when selecting characters my cursor went everywhere when barely tilting their control stick though I'll take that problem over lag any day so with games I played here I can say overclocking the Dreamcast maybe necessary to make some games playable Dreamcast games seem like a hit-or-miss for the pi3 but overclocking made a lot of the misc games more playable for me anyway the graphical problems can't be fixed but as long as you can clearly see the game overclocking the PI might be ortho getting another PI 3 just for that man I mean I definitely put it higher up there if you're that serious about getting Dreamcast games to be more playable just know it won't be perfect even after you overclock it and if you want to see more of these games in action I have a stream with myself playing every Dreamcast game I had with my settings so as I said that PSP has a non LR version of the emulator called ppsspp you can use I wrote it off at first after a little testing but after I heard more people online saying it was the better emulator I had to look into the better settings I had an idea as to what would help emulation speed but honestly I was way off and would now recommend this emulator over the LR version the reddit poster professor Paragon put this up and the settings really worked for me the settings you want to change our turn frame skip - to turn on auto frame skip then prevent the PSP from exceeding 60 FPS change the render resolution to 2 X 1 as this makes the textures more clear and in the audio settings make the audio latency high to help with the choppy audio now that's what the post said but honestly in my opinion you want to keep auto frames gift off because for me it usually picks bad settings see the wave frame skipping works here is that zero it's trying to run the game in its intended framerate so a 60 FPS game will try to run at 60 fps putting it at 1 will run it at half so it runs at 30fps doing this means it should run a bit smoother even if I can't reach the intended speed only issue here is that if the game is supposed to run at 30fps you're now playing at 15 and that's pretty damn slow and choppy now a frame skip of two runs at a third of the frame rate and like 20 FPS sounds already but on 30 FPS games it will run at 1010 so in my opinion you should experiment and see what works best on a game by game basis so now with this we can play some games with a lot less guys where's my L button why do u emulators keep having weird controls just let them be comparable to the original I swear I can't catch a break when not using our emulators hell even the D input on my may flash to use l3 is start and had no L or R buttons when I was testing Dreamcast ok ok enough complaining I recommend you have a mouse plugged in for this so you don't accidentally prevent yourself from changing your controller settings you know I actually give this emulator credit for having pretty nice-looking setup and save space and so on trust me when I say this it's the best non LR emulator I've seen on the retro PI drastic coming in as a close second like with the Dreamcast I'm only going to cover the games with my overclocking settings and I'm only gonna use the non LR emulator I'd love to show the difference in speeds between emulators and overclocking speeds but the point of this video is to show what the best settings can do I will bring up the compatibility list on github if it lacks any major problems that are seen when they didn't overclock it so our old game Dragon Ball Z Shin Budokai another road that's still a mouthful ran mostly the same as last time there was some lag during the flashy attacks and super moves but it was still bearable I would consider the game playable without the overclocking but less lag is okay by me persona played just as fine to the 3ds section still lag a bit but I feel almost none casually walking and only a bit when running so I do see the improvements here whenever I play through this series I might consider playing it on the PI now so the last game from our old list monster hunter freedom unite actually surprised me a bit like seriously watch the stream the text is fixed and is actually readable while out in the field it does run better normally but the game did lag between attacks if you and I didn't encounter a giant monster distressed tested the lag between attacks would already keep me out but still I have to give a credit and say it runs much better now now for the new games naruto ultimate ninja heroes - a slightly less mouthful ran horrible and gameplay and when i mean horrible i mean it stated around 5 to 10 FPS Final Fantasy 7 Crisis Core actually surprised me the cutscene movies ran fantastic and looked great while the in-game cutscenes had some lag issues gameplay struggled with more people and bigger monsters but I could see frames skip on 1 being playable for some people Kingdom Hearts birth by Sleep ran pretty great at first but after seeing multiple enemies just destroy the framerate I couldn't see it as playable the 15 fps makes the game look too stuttery for me - sorry but I wouldn't call this one playable Mega Man powered up was said to be almost full speed on the list but I called BS as it runs it like 75% even after all my settings at frame skipped 1 though it's honestly pretty smooth and makes me feel like it's playable until you find a boss and the 30fps makes the bosses invisible with the flickering if you can get around that then I would say this game runs fantastic but when I already suck at basic Megaman having an extra challenge isn't my thing and lastly egg Drew's Union I'm sure you've never heard of this game but think of it like Fire Emblem but with limited cards and special skills with the cards and I'm not saying Fire Emblem as a basis for every strategy RPG I mean it literally has the weapon triangle anyway I would easily call this game perfect at first but then when I started a fight it just kicked me out of the game rude apparently this caused the emulators cache to be filled and it put the game in a low cash mode when I restarted that caused some minor glitches but I'd still say it was playable like the music voices and everything else was really good however if it kicks you out of the game too often I'd have to say I'm playable for sure so with our last PSP game I would have to call this a pleasant surprise sadly I don't believe any of these games ever ran a hundred percent with no lag or problems which is a shame however some games seem more playable than others and you'd really have to ask whether you're willing to put up with some things to play these games on the PI though I would have to put this pretty low on the list for reasons to overclock the PI again if some bits seem playable for you then it's fine but for me the only games I'd consider really playable we're DBZ in persona and I'd say they were both playable without overclocking Crisis Core would be in that area of put up with it but everything else like too badly or had some other problems keeping me away I'd stick with whatever the base PI can do and leave it there I just can't see people putting more money into this one not a single game ran perfect after everything else we tried so is overclocking a worthy endeavor to get these more complicated systems working with less lag with that it now if you're PI can be overclocked and you don't mind adding the extra equipment I think you should give it a shot along with the extra emulators in the settings we showed today you can more than likely take advantage of some of these things to get your games running better even without overclocking the real question is whether you're willing to buy multiple PI's until you can get one with a good overclocking speed and in my opinion no I get many people out there up - attics and hell I'm not far off but I can't imagine a conversation with a normal person and telling them you have to get lucky when buying a computer to get the best settings even if these games are running perfectly I would still struggle selling this but obviously they don't so I really can't recommend it unless you're a PI phonetic I got lucky and only had to buy one more PI to get the settings I desired but when it comes down to luck this could have been three or four pi purchases I was seriously ready to give away retro PI's as holiday gifts for friends that's nothing against this device as a whole though as it runs everything else without problems you won't see me playing on anything else when the game runs fine so please don't take this as the PI sucks for the money you're spending you won't find anything better in my opinion even some of these games run pretty good without any extra tweaking but when some of the best games on the system struggle even after you've tried everything it's time to admit defeat so to all of you out there that decide you want to take the plunge with overclocking I wish you all the best of luck to the rest of you that decide you don't want to take that plunge I hope you can find a solution that doesn't break the bank this has been one hell of a video and I hope I was able to help you all whether it was getting the pi3 overclock - giving you some extra tips for emulation or if I just helped you make a final decision honestly it just means the world to me that you're willing to watch this far I want to thank every single one of you for supporting me and my content you guys seriously Rock if you're new though and you'd like to see more content about the PI I've done three other videos so far ranging from my original review showing off tons of different emulators for the PI 3 to showing off the experimental ones before overclocking and also explaining why the PI doesn't have a power button and what makeshift solution you can buy to give it one as I said here I've also been streaming with these overclocking settings to help give you all an idea of how the games run and so feel free to give those a watch and I plan to stream more games off the PI as well so feel free to subscribe if you're interested in seeing it I think I'm gonna take a break from reviewing the PI it's been fun but I kind of want to look at other avenues for emulation you know just to see if they fare as good people say they do so I want to thank you all for watching and I hope you all have a fantastic day this is Mike jr. ii signing [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: MikeJRthe2nd

Views: 46,878

Keywords: Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 3, Emulation, MikeJRthe2nd, Nintendo, Nintendo 64, NES Classic, SNES Classic, SNES, NES, Pi, Bios, Pi3, B+, Model B+, PSP, Playstation, Playstation Portable, Dreamcast, Sega Dreamcast, SD, Sega, Crazy Taxi, Mario, Paper Mario, Pokemon, Sonic, DBZ, Emulation Machine, Overclocking, Settings, tutorial, code, Coding, Linux, RetroPie, Overclocking RetroPie, Raspberry Pi 3 Overclocking, Raspberry Pi 3 Retropie, Emulation Station, Retroarch, Zelda OOT

Id: 6iJd_EgOokw

Length: 37min 5sec (2225 seconds)

Published: Tue May 22 2018