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Retroarch Beetle HW trouble


SilverDragon81

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Hey all, I have been driving myself crazy the last few days with this issue. Really hoping I can get some help here. I have been trying to set up launchbox and get everything running smoothly but I ran into a problem with multidisk games on ps1. I did some research and found that epsxe does not support easy swapping of discs from inside launchbox ( I am looking for the easiest, most intuitive methods possible since my wife and children will be using this when it is complete). I decided to test the waters in retroarch for my multidisk games but when I run the games through Beetle HW core they are choppy and laggy to the point of being unplayable. I tried tweaking some of the settings withing retroarch to fix this but have had no luck, so I went to the libretro forums to ask for help but it will not let me post anything there for some reason. What doesn't make sense to me is that the games I am testing in Beetle I have also tested in epsxe and they run fine there. It is like night and day. Please help.

For reference my system specs:

Intel i5 4460 3.2GHz

16GB DDR3 RAM

Nvidia GTX 1050Ti

windows 10 64bit

All my drivers are updated

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I'm no expert when it comes to RA and the various cores, but as far as I understand HW is a more accurate core meaning it takes far more resources to emulate. I would try the standard "Beetle PSX" core and see if you still see the same results. It is the core I use currently for PS1.

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The difference between the HW and the SW core are that the HW core will utilize a GPU and allow for resolution upscaling. The SW core is purely CPU based,  and unless things have changed since i last looked at it does not allow resolution upscaling. "Technically" the SW core is the more accurate one, but also has downsides like the resolution scaling mentioned.

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26 minutes ago, neil9000 said:

 unless things have changed since i last looked at it does not allow resolution upscaling. "Technically" the SW core is the more accurate one, but also has downsides like the resolution scaling mentioned.

Yes the software core does up scaling of internal resolution which does help graphic fidelity.

SilverDragon81, maybe post the options you have set for the core. Seems your spec should be able to handle either PSX core fine.

Edit: You could start the Task Manager and switch to the performance tab and see your CPU utilization as you run PSX and that might help narrow down where the bottleneck is. (If you right click the graphin task manager you can switch to a per logical core view)

Edited by Headrush69
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28 minutes ago, Headrush69 said:

SilverDragon81, maybe post the options you have set for the core. Seems your spec should be able to handle either PSX core fine.

As of right now they are back to default settings, I just tested the other Beetle core to see if it changed anything and it still is doing the same thing. 

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snip 4.png*Edit*

Just ran task manager while the game was running in retroarch and CPU never went above 14% GPU never went above 15% RAM was pretty constant at about 10% usage so there aren't any bottlenecks there. Like I said these games run flawlessly in epsxe and I have the settings in that emulator bumped up for better graphics quality. Just doesn't make sense why it's doing this.

Edited by SilverDragon81
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15 minutes ago, Headrush69 said:

Are you cores up to date?

My config items are different. If you have Retroarch 1.8.4, it now has built in core updating.

pretty sure the core is up to date, they can be updated within retroarch right? I will double check but I am sure I updated them before starting.

snip 5.png

Edited by SilverDragon81
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36 minutes ago, SilverDragon81 said:

Tried Vulkan and Gl video drivers

Best to stick to 1 when diagnosing. I wondered why our settings were different, I'm using GLcore video driver.

A couple suggestions, try changing CD to preloaded, eliminated disc reading as an issue.

Also disable GTE overloading for now.

Do you have any shaders enabled?

Maybe also trying running the Mednefan standalone, and help determine if it's Retroarch specific or not.

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50 minutes ago, Headrush69 said:

Best to stick to 1 when diagnosing. I wondered why our settings were different, I'm using GLcore video driver.

A couple suggestions, try changing CD to preloaded, eliminated disc reading as an issue.

Also disable GTE overloading for now.

Do you have any shaders enabled?

Maybe also trying running the Mednefan standalone, and help determine if it's Retroarch specific or not.

Changed settings accordingly and it changed nothing for me. Nope don't use shaders, at least not until I can get the base settings working right.

I downloaded Mednafen standalone and I am not sure how to get it working, checked the website and there is a lot going on there. Seems like a much more complicated emulator than I am capable of learning in a few minutes. It doesn't seem to load when I run the application file.

 

*edit*

Ok so I figured out how to get the game loaded with a quick google search. and low and behold it works perfectly fine with the standalone emulator, not a single hiccup.

Did a quick test inside launchbox to make sure I can get the standalone running there and now I just have to learn more about the emulator to get the settings right (i.e. fullscreen, disc swapping and controls) if you have any advice for these settings I would appreciate it. I will have to come back to this later as I have some things to take care of. Thank you again for all your assistance, hopefully I won't run into more issues like this with other emulators.

Edited by SilverDragon81
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15 minutes ago, SilverDragon81 said:

*edit*

Ok so I figured out how to get the game loaded with a quick google search. and low and behold it works perfectly fine with the standalone emulator, not a single hiccup.

I would suggest installing a second copy of Retroarch somewhere and running the same game from there. (Don't change any settings)

If it works fine there, we know it's not Retroarch itself but a settings somewhere and we can work from there.

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MAn, retroarch can just get itself all weird sometimes.  I always have to keep a copy of an original config because even when saving core overrides only, somehow it has kept overlays from previous cores and applied them to the next for example.  I've kept a clean download handy to start fresh several times.  Once you do like 4 or 5 systems it just seems to want to implode on itself and get wonky with certain things.  Hopefully mednafen can someday cover even more systems because that emulator just flat out works.

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19 hours ago, Headrush69 said:

I would suggest installing a second copy of Retroarch somewhere and running the same game from there. (Don't change any settings)

If it works fine there, we know it's not Retroarch itself but a settings somewhere and we can work from there.

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you, but I tried a couple things. First I tried reinstalling retroarch on the boot drive of my pc to see if maybe the speed of the drive was causing problems, it wasn't I had the same issues there. So I figured I would try installing it on my laptop which unfortunately is a pretty good step up from my pc so kinda not a good test but it worked fine there.

system specs for laptop are:

intel i7 7700HQ 2.8GHz

16 GB DDR4 RAM

Nvidia GTX 1050Ti

not sure what to make of this issue.

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