Arcade 1Ups replica cabs thread

80s Synth Pop

unlucky Mine arrive this morning too and thankfully it's all in one piece. The basic packaging was a risk with something as fragile as this.

hellboy99

80s Synth Pop wrote: »

unlucky Mine arrive this morning too and thankfully it's all in one piece. The basic packaging was a risk with something as fragile as this.

Unreal, who in their right name packs something in the way they did

Guess I'll have to wait now another 2 months for a replacement, that's if they even send out one.

McDermotX

Yep......broken one here as well.

Completely unacceptable packaging. Broken in two like it was folded over. Lovely.

CiDeRmAn

Mine arrived last week with a large crack, though it's not as catastrophic as yours

CiDeRmAn

Giving some serious thought to converting my Asteroids cab to Retropie.
I'd need to change the spinner to a compatible one for the Pie.

Inviere

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Giving some serious thought to converting my Asteroids cab to Retropie.
I'd need to change the spinner to a compatible one for the Pie.

Not to knock the Pi, it's a grand little gizmo, but I just can't hack anything on it after using RetroArch with the run-ahead latency reduction feature...the input lag on a Pi is a killer now for me. Funds willing of course, but if you could get a low end/basic PC in there you'd have a far better emulation experience with it, than you would a Pi

KeRbDoG

Inviere wrote: »

Not to knock the Pi, it's a grand little gizmo, but I just can't hack anything on it after using RetroArch with the run-ahead latency reduction feature...the input lag on a Pi is a killer now for me. Funds willing of course, but if you could get a low end/basic PC in there you'd have a far better emulation experience with it, than you would a Pi

Interesting - would the input lag with the Pi be via the GPIO port or a USB adapter or is it because of RetroArch?

Shapey Fiend

I don't think I'm being a spod when I say my retropie has horrible input lag, particularly on SNES emulation. I must check this out.

ozmo

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Interesting - would the input lag with the Pi be via the GPIO port or a USB adapter or is it because of RetroArch?

Possibly no need to use USB adapters if you dont have a crazy number of buttons
- there are plenty GPIO pins and retropie does have a GPIO-to-Keyboard driver built in to support two joysticks. You assign keys to GPIO pins - and in Retropie you assign the key to a function as normal.

The driver I used was able to support 3 joysticks.

It would be nice is Retropie supported the GPIO natively - ie not emulating a usb keyboard. Wonder why it doesnt?

Inviere

KeRbDoG wrote: »

Interesting - would the input lag with the Pi be via the GPIO port or a USB adapter or is it because of RetroArch?

I've not tried anything via GPIO admittedly, however, even on PC the difference between Run-Ahead ON/OFF is gamechanging. Games like Super Mario World and MegaMan feel completely different, and far more playable than before. There's basically two instances of the RA core running at the same time, so it's not something the Pi could handle.

The Last Bandit

The run-ahead feature is separate to actual input lag, its able to reduce the perceived lag by some real clever monkeying about with the running game engine to remove wasted frames.

The actual time from when you press the button to when its detect/processed/filtered up to the emulator hasn't changed at all.

GPIO vs USB, hmm... the USB stack is well established and can be tweaked to poll every 1ms and quick look at the SNESDev driver shows its waits 20ms between polling the GPIO's - which corresponds to a 50Hz frame.. I'd definitely change that to 16ms anyway to get better compatibility with 60Hz stuff.
But, then again the faster you poll the higher the CPU load and less CPU available for your emulator..

Inviere

The Last Bandit wrote: »

The actual time from when you press the button to when its detect/processed/filtered up to the emulator hasn't changed at all.

No, that'd require a hardware solution I'd imagine? The real reduction is in latency, from when the button press is received by RetroArch. Comparing something like a stock RetroPie installation, against the pc version of RetroArch with Run Ahead configured is literally game changing in terms of latency reduction (they claim it can reduce latency lower than real/original hardware, and it damn well feels close to it). PLUS, you have all those lovely modern shaders to use (ones that a Pi just unfortunately hasn't got the juice to run), which make retrogaming on a modern display so much more palatable than how it looks stock. It's a more expensive solution, but the additional cost isn't for nothing, you get real/significant improvements to the user experience, and the gameplay.

o1s1n

Any idea how it works? So I press a button on my controller, that is processed and appears on an LCD screen that has lag...apart from predicting what I'm going to press and doing it before I actually press the button, I can't really figure out how that works if the screen has lag?

Inviere

o1s1n wrote: »

Any idea how it works? So I press a button on my controller, that is processed and appears on an LCD screen that has lag...apart from predicting what I'm going to press and doing it before I actually press the button, I can't really figure out how that works if the screen has lag?

It runs two instances of the game, the one on screen, and the other offscreen but slightly ahead. Technical explanation (I only ever use Two-Instance Mode as there's audio issues with Single Instance Mode for me). I'm not entirely sure how it works, I can only comment on how effective it is, it's a stellar reduction in latency.

Here is a more detailed explanation on runahead by its author Dwedit.

How the Run-Ahead feature currently works:

There are two modes of operation.

Single-Instance Mode
Two-Instance Mode
In Single-Instance mode, when it wants to run a frame, instead it does this:

Disable audio and video, run a frame, Save State
Run additional frames with audio and video disabled if we want to run ahead more than one frame
Enable audio and video and run the frame we want to see
Load State
All save states and load states are done to ram and never reach the disk.

In Two-Instance mode, it does this:

Primary core does Audio only, then saves state
Secondary core loads state, runs frames ahead discarding audio and video, then runs a frame with video only.
For performance reasons, it only resyncs the secondary core when input is dirty, otherwise it keeps running additional frames on the secondary core while the input is clean.

Why bother with Two-Instance mode at all? Many of the cores do not leave audio emulation in a clean state after loading state, so you would get buzzing. Using Two-Instance mode makes the primary core not do any load states and avoids that.

In Single-Instance mode, it is possible to improve performance further by running ahead without loading state while input is clean, but I am not currently doing that.
I'd imagine there'd be issues if calling the "run a frame" function left you in a state further along than a single frame.

I'm also not doing any speculative inputs at all.

https://docs.libretro.com/guides/runahead/

The Last Bandit

Its basically magic.

Inviere

It's also game dependent. Ie, not all games will work via the one setting (in terms of how many frames you want to run ahead). Some games will be '2', others might be '3', another could be '1', and so forth. So you basically run the game, measure how many frames you need to run ahead, and save the settings...next time you load the game it'll apply those settings, so it's a once per game setup.

CiDeRmAn

The Last Bandit wrote: »

Its basically magic.

It's finding an alternate dimension, where everything is 2 seconds out of step with this reality and, in an unexpected turn of events, Prince is still alive....
They then link the console here to the console there and, boom, no-lag gameplay... Also, more raspberry berets...

80s Synth Pop

I must try that "run ahead" system out. Never used it when it first came out as the mame devs said it was an ugly hack
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=378841&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&vc=1

Interested now to see how it runs.

Inviere

80s Synth Pop wrote: »

I must try that "run ahead" system out. Never used it when it first came out as the mame devs said it was an ugly hack
http://www.mameworld.info/ubbthreads/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=378841&page=&view=&sb=5&o=&vc=1

Interested now to see how it runs.

The MAME Dev's would call the Mona Lisa an ugly hack too :P

In that thread above, highlights a difference in design philosophy. RetroArch itself isn't an emulator, it's a frontend for any number of RetroArch 'cores', which are either exclusive emulators for a given system, or ports of existing ones, designed to run in the RetroArch environment.

I personally love the RetroArch model, because it means I can play an NES game, followed by an N64 game, followed by a Snes game, followed then a PS1 game, all without having to run individual dedicated emulators. When itself fronted by something like Launchbox (so a frontend for a frontend really), it because a super streamlined experience, where you only need to ever configure one emulator for ALL of your settings, custom controls, display settings, shaders, etc. If you imagine something like the Nes and Snes Mini user experience, but better, and expanded across many many more systems.

I feel the MAME Dev's in that thread, while I have the utmost respect for them, are probably being a little harsh. I'd have RetroArch all day long over individual emulators, with the exception of a handful like Dolphin.

Inviere

I will say this though, setting RetroArch up isn't particularly difficult or beyond the abilities of anyone at all, it is a bit involved if you want it just right. Secondly, the UI isn't to everyones liking, so I find RetroArch paired with Launchbox (LB provides all the lovely scraped info, artwork, boxart, instruction manuals etc, and gives the feeling of a polished, finished product) is the best I've ever used. There's very very little I could say bad about the whole thing.

Doge

Collected my SFII overlay from the depot today and it's in one piece. I'll probably offer this up to someone on here as I'm gonna go try and break out the Rust-oleum today and spray the original panel if it stays dry.




Arcade1UP is now selling these on there site for about 40 or 50 dollars,a but cheeky if you ask me.

Skerries

let us know how this goes as I don't fancy trying to drill out this for my extra buttons

Doge

Skerries wrote: »

let us know how this goes as I don't fancy trying to drill out this for my extra buttons

It should be fine so long as you don't touch it within 10 /15 mins after spraying like I did. :pac:

I noticed a patch that was still damp when the rest had dried and put my finger on it out of curiousity, ended up smudging and lifting the paint in the process.




Just goes to show how crappy the paint job is on these things.

I'm thinking of mounting my speakers to the front of the cab now underneath the control panel:



Would save me drilling into the protective overlay as I'll probably end up using it now.

Skerries

4 player mod

Jerichoholic

One of the lads from Arcade1up was on We Talk Games. He strongly hinted at a cabinet with a wheel and pedals for racing games coming soon.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/WeTalkGames

Shapey Fiend

I always think it's odd when people theme arcade machines around non-arcade games.

o1s1n

Especially if it's a game like Zelda that's not even close to being an arcade game.

Inviere

Shapey Fiend wrote: »

I always think it's odd when people theme arcade machines around non-arcade games.

Gtfo, nothing like a Super Mario World themed cab....

Doge

Jerichoholic wrote: »

One of the lads from Arcade1up was on We Talk Games. He strongly hinted at a cabinet with a wheel and pedals for racing games coming soon.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/WeTalkGames

God I can only imagine how poor the quality of the wheel and pedals will be to make them affordable.

Since they cheaped out on joysticks and buttons then this doesn't sound promising.

The buttons weren't too bad compared to the buttons in the iCades though.

Those were a nightmare, your hands would tire in 2 minutes they were so heavy and clunky.

Oisín took the piss out of me saying it before, but he obviously doesn't know just how bad they were!
I've since wanted to replace all the buttons in his cabs with stock iCade buttons to get my revenge.

Doge

Anyone in Cork want a Street Fighter II protector overlay thingie for free?

It would save me posting it.

I've since finished my cab minus PCB mounting and cable managment.

Must get a video of it up later.