Date:  May 3, 2020

*This blog entry is for education purpose.  All info obtained from Google Search.

Over-Clock

The new Raspberry Pi 4 is great!

And only after a few months later, RetroPie came up with the Beta version of RetroPie for Raspberry Pi 4.

Raspberry Pi 4 has a ARM Cortex-A72 CPU.  And you can overclock the CPU (Default is 800Mhz) and GPU (default is 500Mhz).

You can see what is your CPU clock speed using this command.  Press F4 to exit from RetroPie into the unix prompt.

To overclock the CPU and GPU, you need to edit the /boot/config.txt file.  You also need to know what you are doing.  In case you are stuck, reboot Raspberry Pi and press and hold or hit many times the SHIFT key while rebooting to skip the “overclocking” config.

sudo vi /boot/config.txt (using vi or nano as text editor is fine).  Uncomment the arm_freq line, and add in the following.  This will tell the Raspberry Pi to overclock the Raspberry Pi to 2.147Ghz, and set the GPU to 750Mhz.  This will greatly improve your Retropie capability.  You might even play Nintendo Playstation, PSP, Dreamcast and N64 games here.  I am also trying to get the Nintendo DS emulator (Drastic) to work properly too.

OK, if the Raspberry Pi 4 won’t boot, may be is the arm_greq=2147 is too high.  May be set the arm_freq=2000 and try again.  Mine does not work on 2147, but it works on 2000.

Type “sudo reboot now” to reboot.

Oh ya, we are overdriving the Raspberry Pi 4.  So, it will generates a lot a lot of heat.  So, make sure you have proper heat sink, CPU fan to drive those heat away.

Refer here if got problem.  https://magpi.raspberrypi.org/articles/how-to-overclock-raspberry-pi-4

Playstation Emulator on Retropie is using PCSX Rearmed.

So, by right, you can run Playstation 1 (PS1) games on your Raspberry Pi 4 + Retropie.

Nowdays the kids only know PS4.  But back in 20 plus years ago.  We played PS1.  So, there are some games you would want to play again.

You copy all the PS1 games onto this directory.

/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/psx

RetroPie will be intelligent enough to enable the PCSX Rearmed emulator for all the games you placed down here.

For education purpose, I am going to tell you where you can google and download some PS1 roms for experiment.

https://www.retrostic.com/roms/ps-1

There are many others out there, just find those that is reputable and no-virus.

You probably wanted to create directory for each games.  So that you can label the game properly.

One problem I found when I launched the game is

“No PlayStation BIOS file found – add for better compatibility”

You still can play the games, but it might have problem.  So, it is best to find where to download and copy these BIOS onto the RetroPie.

As you can see the default systems does not come with the Playstation BIOS.

May be download them here?  You will need to download these three files and rename it to lower case.  And copy it to /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS directory.

scph5500.bin

scph5501.bin

scph5502.bin

http://www.psxdev.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=56

If you need more info, you probably can read here.

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/9674/retro-pie-4-2-psx-bios-not-found

Once you load up, you are good to go.  See, no more error message.

And now, you can play Playstation PS1 game on your RetroPie.  Yeah!!

And the video is smooth.

All these games are games I love when I was young.  We called it Retro gaming.