PSX Emulation

    Has anyone gotten good results from running PSX games on stock Libreelec on an Rpi4 4gb?


    I am able to run the games with PCSX and have installed the correct bioses, but the games are all stuttering, especially the sound. Sometimes the games even crash/freeze and I have to restart the emulator.

    Beetle PSX performance is downright terrible.

    I know the roms are okay as I have dual boot set up and can play everything on Lakka fine. I also know Libreelec and RetroArch support are working fine, as NES, SNES, GBA etc games all work fine. But PSX games, regardless of whatever emulation settings I try are all unplayable (I am very new at this but tried almost everything).


    I have scoured the internet to see if there is any solution without using some alternative Libreelec build or some other RPi image but there doesn't seem to be any example of a person getting PSX emulation to work on stock Libreelec. I am hoping for someone to either tell me the method that works for them or confirm that this is indeed impossible so I can go on with my life.

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    That's right. I have been using Libreelec for 2 years and try PSX emulation every now and then on the same hardware. The closest I got to it was switching from bettle to PCSX but it is still unplayable.

    Same RPi runs these games fine using Lakka or RetroPie.

    Running "perf top" when playing a game may be interesting.

    Wait for it to settle, and see if there's anything that shows up high on the profile.

    If you can run the same on Lakka, that would also be useful.

    Here are the perf tops.

    After seeing this I also changed the IAGL configuration to disable pausing Kodi when a game is launched (even though I am NOT launching IAGL games, these are local ROMs). At first I thought maybe it was a tiiiiiny bit better but then the game crashed again.

    For libreelec I could only get the perf tops when emu is starting (Sony entertainment presents etc) and then in the in-game menu. It crashed when it starts loading the actual game. Lakka is while playing i.e. racing. More or less all games act the same way.

    Libreelec Emu:

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    Lakka:

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    pcsx-rearmed contains special optimizations for arm architectures (dynamic recompiler and emulated graphics card optimized with NEON instructions). if they are not enabled it's essentially unusable. Lakka enables them, the kodi addon (used by libreelec) does not. Or at least that's what I saw. I'll try to take a look at it.

    Quote from ilmich

    pcsx-rearmed contains special optimizations for arm architectures (dynamic recompiler and emulated graphics card optimized with NEON instructions). if they are not enabled it's essentially unusable. Lakka enables them, the kodi addon (used by libreelec) does not. Or at least that's what I saw. I'll try to take a look at it.

    sorry, forget what I wrote. in the past pcsx_rearmed had to be compiled by manually inserting optimizations at build time (as the LAKKA build system still does). But I saw that now the best architecture and options are automatically selected by the makefile without any need to specify them

    Quote from popcornmix

    We are spending nearly half the time in KODI::RETRO::CDeltaPairMemoryStream::SubmitFrameInternal.

    That seems to be used by the "rewind" feature. Disable it:

    https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Fix_Games_Runing_Slow_in_Kodi

    Thank you popcornmix. Disabling rewind did change the symptoms, (in my defense this is just one of tens of different settings I had tried and it just so happens that it was left on when I posted this thread.) but both emulators remain unplayable. It is good to know this should just be kept off.

    For Beetle PSX, the stuttering continues and the game just runs very slowly. It runs and does not crash, but unplayable. I have reverted to default settings which have not helped and also tried a bunch of stuff to no avail.

    For PSCX the emulator is running very fast and crashing, I think that is the same as the pull request:

    Quote from mglae

    There seem to be a matching PR: https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/25460

    Here are some new perf topses from both PCSX (crashes before I can begin playing) and beetle (runs but a lot of stuttering and very slow) on LE:

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    Seeing as how there aren't any conflicting views, I think as of now the PSX emulation on RPi 4, and possibly also on 5 -since it doesn't seem to be a performance issue- is not working.


    Hope this saves someone some time in the future :)

    If it works on Lakka, we should be able to figure out why it doesn't work on Kodi. When I updated all game add-ons to their Lakka version (https://github.com/LibreELEC/LibreELEC.tv/pull/7705) it should have made both PSX cores build with the same flags that Lakka uses. I can check again and see if any flags have been updated.

    The rewind feature slows down larger games a bunch. Definitely disable it for PSX cores.

    The next likely cause is NEON/dynarec options. If either is disabled, you could see slowdowns like you do.

    I have an RPi 3/4/5, so I'll try to reproduce when I get a chance.

    Going into settings after launching PCSX, I don't see any settings related to NEON or dynarec. Nothing in Retroarch settings either. In beetle PSX I saw CPU dynarec was disabled, I set it to "execute" but now the game crashes immediately after the PS logo. I am looking at retroarch.cfg but I don't see any NEON or dynarec settings there either.


    If I'm missing something let me know and I'll give that a try. Sorry I'm very new at this.