Super Retro-Cade

[PSX_Specter]

I agree that lakka is very much a mad scientist's experiment at this time. Running cpu intensive games for a couple hours, my cpu temp maxed out at 62C. If the orange pi pc .dtb is disabling the cpu hotplug governor I am fine with that. Good trade off for the performance gain. I originally tried that .dtb because i read somewhere that the orange pi pc ran at 1.3ghz, and I couldn't find any other way to try to overclock I am still left wondering... when the system is powered on, it makes a choice to boot from nand or sd card if one is plugged in. Is this decided by something contained in the onboard firmware, or something on the nand itself? That would influence how adventurous I would be with flashing lakka to the nand. It seems like the intended purpose of being able to boot from the sd slot would be to restore the system if the nand got borked. I don't know. Has anyone gotten any images other than orange pi linux, or lakka to boot into a reasonably usable state? I have tried a couple of images for set top boxes and tablets and I can get some video output but it always ends up freezing (missing hardware, lack of ram, who knows?) Being able to triple boot a linux desktop, custom android firmware, and lakka would be vulgar. I'm rambling. Keep up the great work, guys !

 

[WD_GASTER2]

I agree that lakka is very much a mad scientist's experiment at this time. Running cpu intensive games for a couple hours, my cpu temp maxed out at 62C. If the orange pi pc .dtb is disabling the cpu hotplug governor I am fine with that. Good trade off for the performance gain. I originally tried that .dtb because i read somewhere that the orange pi pc ran at 1.3ghz, and I couldn't find any other way to try to overclock I am still left wondering... when the system is powered on, it makes a choice to boot from nand or sd card if one is plugged in. Is this decided by something contained in the onboard firmware, or something on the nand itself? That would influence how adventurous I would be with flashing lakka to the nand. It seems like the intended purpose of being able to boot from the sd slot would be to restore the system if the nand got borked. I don't know. Has anyone gotten any images other than orange pi linux, or lakka to boot into a reasonably usable state? I have tried a couple of images for set top boxes and tablets and I can get some video output but it always ends up freezing (missing hardware, lack of ram, who knows?) Being able to triple boot a linux desktop, custom android firmware, and lakka would be vulgar. I'm rambling. Keep up the great work, guys !

its decided by the SOC.
on boot it looks for a file named magic.bin with a specific value. it gives priority to sd cards first. if not found there it will proceed to boot from the nand.

 

[PSX_Specter]

its decided by the SOC.
on boot it looks for a file named magic.bin with a specific value. it gives priority to sd cards first. if not found there it will proceed to boot from the nand.

That's great news. It's my understanding then that flashing lakka to the nand presents very little risk since the nand can be restored by booting to the sd card if lakka doesnt want to work from the nand. Knowing now that it gives boot priority to the sd card, I'm not as afraid to risk it. (wringing hands and grinning like a maniac)

 

[WD_GASTER2]

That's great news. It's my understanding then that flashing lakka to the nand presents very little risk since the nand can be restored by booting to the sd card if lakka doesnt want to work from the nand. Knowing now that it gives boot priority to the sd card, I'm not as afraid to risk it. (wringing hands and grinning like a maniac)

...except that lakka uses a different boot method. im trying to find it on the internet i was reading about it the other day. if you notice the primary partition of lakka lacks that magic.bin.
dunno if that will cause issues if it gets installed to the primary nand.

edit: im looking for the source right now. give me a little bit.

 

[PSX_Specter]

...except that lakka uses a different boot method. im trying to find it on the internet i was reading about it the other day. if you notice the primary partition of lakka lacks that magic.bin.
dunno if that will cause issues if it gets installed to the primary nand.

edit: im looking for the source right now. give me a little bit.

Good grief, I'm determined to brick this thing. If it's as easy as just adding magic.bin to the primary partition, that would be amazing.

 

[WD_GASTER2]

im just as crazy as you are. i like your attitude.
i cant find that stupid source but to show my point. if you nottice lakka uses the uenv.txt

http://linux-sunxi.org/UEnv.txt

i still wonder if the magic.bin file is the ultimate override to this. to be fair... i believe the worst case scenario would be getting stuck in lakka :S
screw it. ill go flash lakka myself and let you know how it goes.

 

[PSX_Specter]

im just as crazy as you are. i like your attitude.
i cant find that stupid source but to show my point. if you nottice lakka uses the uenv.txt

http://linux-sunxi.org/UEnv.txt

i still wonder if the magic.bin file is the ultimate override to this. to be fair... i believe the worst case scenario would be getting stuck in lakka :S

My biggest fear is that with the orange pi pc.dtb in uEnv.txt, it won't recognize the nand that it's installed to, rendering it useless.

 

[WD_GASTER2]

im going in. ill let you know how it goes.

 

[PSX_Specter]

im going in. ill let you know how it goes.

Godspeed, Gaster. Shall you fall in battle, I myself will carry you through the gates of Valhalla!

 

[WD_GASTER2]

ok, so i can report that....
the device was bricked after the lakka flash to the internal nand ...
the good news is that i could still boot lakka from sd card and i am now flashing my 1.1 firmware to the device.

 

[PSX_Specter]

ok, so i can report that....
the device was bricked after the lakka flash to the internal nand ...
the good news is that i could still boot lakka from sd card and i am now flashing my 1.1 firmware to the device.

Ok, so we know that it will revert to booting to the sd card, that's great news. Can you try the standard orange pi lite image with sun8i-h3-bananapi-m2-plus.dtb and see if that works? If we can find the right combination of lakka image and uEnv. variables, this could still be viable.

 

[WD_GASTER2]

tried that too right now and also a brick

 

[PSX_Specter]

Ok, so we know that it will revert to booting to the sd card, that's great news. Can you try the standard orange pi lite image with sun8i-h3-bananapi-m2-plus.dtb and see if that works?

tried that too right now and also a brick

Aww Well, I thank you for trying. I wish I had a way to fiddle with the android side of things. I think video file playback would be better due to android's superior video driver. Can adb through usb be enabled on the stock retro cade image?

 

[WD_GASTER2]

while we cannot enable adb via usb. we can actually execute almost all if not all adb related commands over the uart cable. such as installing packages, setting times, temporary SU, logcats, writes, deletes, mounts, etc.
i have programmed a dashboard(launcher) that the retro-cade boots to instead of the default rom launcher the retro-cade has so we can launch other applications.
FYI, retroarch works decently over android.

also for the curious:

1.0 had a psx core in the retroarch image. maybe we can launch ps1 games if we define a bios in the original retro-cade launcher cfg file. i will try that a bit later today.
1.1 has a pc engine core which if we install retroarch separately and map it to the /system/cores/lib will launch super cd-rom games provided you map a bios.

 

[PSX_Specter]

while we cannot enable adb via usb. we can actually execute almost all if not all adb related commands over the uart cable. such as installing packages, setting times, temporary SU, logcats, writes, deletes, mounts, etc.
i have programmed a dashboard(launcher) that the retro-cade boots to instead of the default rom launcher the retro-cade has so we can launch other applications.
FYI, retroarch works decently over android.

also for the curious:

1.0 had a psx core in the retroarch image. maybe we can launch ps1 games if we define a bios in the original retro-cade launcher cfg file. i will try that a bit later today.
1.1 has a pc engine core which if we install retroarch separately and map it to the /system/cores/lib will launch super cd-rom games provided you map a bios.

I wonder if apps like netflix or sling tv can run on it? I'm tempted to buy the data east 10" arcade to try just that.

 

[WD_GASTER2]

maybe but a couple of issues:
i tried getting ethernet to run on android and no luck . if anybody can figure this one out they would be doing a huge achievment.

apps like netflix or sling... the processor will be able to handle it but it would easily tap out the 256mb of ram.

 

[PSX_Specter]

maybe but a couple of issues:
i tried getting ethernet to run on android and no luck . if anybody can figure this one out they would be doing a huge achievment.

apps like netflix or sling... the processor will be able to handle it but it would easily tap out the 256mb of ram.

Any luck with mupen64(plus)?

 

[ArugulaZ]

Well give me a crappy sitcom and call me Kimmy Gibbler! The Super Retrocade boots the image you supplied right away! I couldn't get it to work with any of the three Wi-Fi dongles I had on hand, but I can always boot to Linux on one of my PCs and transfer files that way. This is an interesting development for sure.

 

[WD_GASTER2]

you dont need to even boot to linux on a pc. I am not sure who gave you the lakka image, but all you need to do is execute stuff from the linux command line by following the opening post.

 

[ArugulaZ]

Eh, no biggie. This worked too. What didn't work were wifi dongles, and I tried three of them. Then again, I was using the second USB port on the SRC, not that it seems like it would make a difference.

I posted an article about this on my blog, if you'd care to read it. If you don't, it's there anyway. Credit was given to Gaster, Kuwanger, and PSX Specter for this hack.

https://kiblitzing.blogspot.com/2018/10/supercharging-super-retro-cade.html