Getting game emulators working

[radio]

I tried for hours last night and I couldn't get a single emulator to work, and most of them simply don't exist for this version of Debian

 

Has anyone had any luck and with what OS

[Shawn78]

Installing RetroPie on Debian should be rather simple. It takes some time but you will eventually get there.

[NicoD]

For others. You need GPU drivers for many recent emulators. So either wait for mainline support with panthor or use Armbian Jammy with AmazingFate his GPU and multimedia ppa's for RK3588.
You can install tons of emulators with armbian-gaming. PPSSPP, Retropie, aethersx2, android emulation, box86/64 with wine for windows games...

https://github.com/NicoD-SBC/armbian-gaming
It is written for Jammy and should also work on Debian Sid. But with other distro versions not everything might work and I can't give support for it. Now waiting on Ubuntu 24.04 to see if the GPU problems will be fixed with official releas.
Else I'll focus on Debian releases instead.

[EricaLina]

Hello,

 

I've been working to get lutris/ battlenet running on my orang pi 5 plus the last two days.

 

I did this last year on my 386 Arch Linux box. It also took a few days to get running.

 

Lutris always uses its own wine.  But I did go through the motions that were posted here taking the apt install route when possible.

I installed Box64 and 86 and wine32,64 and winetricks through apt. Lutris won't use the wine32 or 64 anyway. You can select alternate wine execs as much as you want it ignores that drop down at runtime.  Supposedly you can code it into the lutris game, battlenet, installer script, but so far I've only changed it to use wine32.

I did get past some steps by using them outside of lutris on the cli.

 

I did eventually get errors about missing libraries and got all of those installed.

I got as far as needing a video driver.

Mesa didn't work, I saw someone said to use Mali run but that is outdated advice I think.  I was about to test fbdev when I hosed my system.

 

The problems have been numerous and I'm beginning to doubt that it will work.

I understand lutris way better than I ever wanted to.

 

I have yet to get the battlenet installer to run.  I changed the installer to use 32bit, and that worked better. I did eventually get to failure trying to get a window. But then really hosed my system, so tired, and had to reinstall my system from SD card again.

 

I have yet to get as far, and I've had a lot of problems I didn't have last time.

 

I just wiped all the lutris dot folders, .cache, .config and .lutris reinstalled and reinstalled.

I was at an apparently unreproducable error that the executable was not found.

 

My default wine prefix is win64 and with my change Games/battlenet is Win32.

 

That worked best so far.  But now I'm back at square one and I'm wondering if anyone has suggestions for how to get battlenet running.

 

I haven't looked to see if bottles or steam works.  It seems maybe just using wine directly might be easier than debugging lutris all day again.  I don't know.

 

Any help or suggestions appreciated.

I'm going to go dig into Nico's site and see what I can learn.

 

Sorry if I repeated, trying to be as informative as possible.

 

Thank you,

Erica

[EricaLina]

Ah, I see. 

 

Thank you!

 

Panthor drivers have made it in to the the kernel but full support won't be there until 6.13.  Armbian is still on 6.1.

So hopefully this spring for kernel 6.13 and then wait for Armbian to use it. Or compile yourself.

 

So we have to wait or go to legacy.

[EricaLina]

Now I see that kernel 6.13 was just released and it does supposedly have all the panthor/Mali GPU driver support. If I've interpreted everything I've read correctly.

So maybe compiling a new kernel. I haven't done that in ages.

Probably won't do that too soon.

[Werner]

mainline support is still under heavy development. Don't expect that 6.13 will magically make everything work properly.

In fact for now the best - close to feature-complete - experience on this soc, rockchip sdk based kernel (6.1.y vendor to say) is the way to go until mainline is more matured.

It took years for RK3399 to mature decently. The same is expected for RK3588 and its derivates. The only advantage there is this time, is the fact that collabora invests in its support and provides the development results for free as open source.

[EricaLina]

Ok, I see it's going to be awhile.  

So even though the graphics might be there, it's not ready as a whole to adopt the new kernel.  The vendor is going to say when the next kernel is ready past 6.1.  and it won't likely be 6.13 but sometime after.