Hello there! :D

Recently, I've acquired a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB. I didn't need one, but I've been wanting to mess around with a newer version of the board for quite sometime.

I've owned a Raspberry Pi 3B for many years, and I keep it loaded with Retropie and a few games I enjoy (or want to properly try someday) for whenever I feel like tinkering with it.

For the 5 board, I wanted to keep it as a desktop, primarily, but keep all the emulation stuff installed and configured. So I installed Raspberry Pi OS 64bit on an SD card, and it works fine, but the emulation side of stuff is, seeminly, way harder if you're inside Raspberry Pi OS.

Retroarch is even more of a bitch to configure than usual, and has very few cores available for it. There's no Redream, nor PPSSPP. No Final Burn Neo. I managed to make Mednafen work with a GUI, and I suppose I can get MAME to work as well, but it's hardly an ideal setup.

So, does anyone around here has some experience setting up a Raspberry Pi 5 in a similar fashion? For some clarity, my ideal setup would be opening something along the lines of Retropie or Batocera's environment/UI as an executable from inside Raspberry Pi OS' desktop, as if it were Steam, or Gog Galaxy.

If that's not possible, which do you guys think is the best experience nowadays: Retropie or Batocera? Or something else?

I've been very happy with Batocera but my experience is mostly on x86, only used it on the raspi zero 2 to test. Wasn't Retropie sort of abandoned a while ago?

Regarding Retroarch, they tend to port the cores to suit the system and changing the name, like Swanstation is a port of Duckstation. But for PPSSPP I'm pretty sure it's available, but on some systems you cannot download incompatible cores, don't know it that's the issue with your build.
The wiki is very good: https://docs.libretro.com/library/ppsspp

If you want to try a front end to manage the games, similar to what Launchbox does on Windows, Emulation Station is used by Batocera and Retropie but not sure how you can use standalone. There may be a few hidden alternative gems but the only I herd of is Pegasus.
I recall it's possible to lanch Retropie from the Raspberry OS (formerly known as Raspbian) but was a convulated way and involved some scripting.

Batocera is great, easy and intuitive (for the most part) and it's able to play some Windows games on x86 builds. Not sure if any emulation of Windows games is available on the Raspberry builds, that would be great :)
Frindly reminder that although not the most elegant solution, Batocera can be run in a Virtual Machine.

Retropie was abandoned? I wasn't aware. Though that explains why the last release on its front page is from 2022.

I tried downloading Batocera, but their official mirror is insanely slow. Managed to get from a mirror provided by a user in a reddit post (assuming all "thank you"s he got were legit and validations of his mirror being legit as well). Later I'll try it with the Raspberry Pi and see where it leads me.

My understanding of the things with Pi OS is that somethings are available, most you need to compile it yourself, something I'd rather avoid. But it isn't a huge loss, I don't think I'd end up tinkering all that much with the OS itself to justify using it.

Thanks for the answer! :D

Interesting topic, bookmarked. I've been pondering about the same things because:

1. I've been meaning to set up emulation stuff on my RPi4 (4GB), not using something like Retropie which apparently turns the whole unit into an emulation gaming system only (right?), but I'd like to install the emulation stuff on a more generic desktop OS (can be Raspberry OS or Manjaro or whatever, doesn't really matter).

If I google online, everyone seems to suggest Retropie, but as said, I would like to retain the system also as a normal desktop OS.

2. I've been thinking of buying a Rpi5 too, even though so far RPi4 has been quite enough for my use, but if RPi5 offers considerably more CPU power for emulation and stuff...

Sorry don't have much to offer to this yet, but you make it seem more complicated on RPi than what it is in e.g. x86 Windows or Linux, where you merely just install the emulators you want and go? Is RPi gaming emulation (for past systems) really still in its infancy? I would have thought it is a great system for that purpose and many RPi users would use it for running old console etc. emulators on it... Too bad if Retropie really is abandoned, the developers just lost interest?

Since you are clearly after emulation, I wouldnt waste time using a pi at all. As they can only do low level consoles.

But since you have one anyway....I would use your flavor of linux on 1 drive and swap out to Android os for your emulators.

You will find using android easier to deal with. Better controller support and better options to toggle. Plus most apk files are easy to find. The down side is collecting them. But it is a good thing you can also backup each file.

My guess is that because it is relatively simple to have different SD Cards for different purposes around and exchange them as necessary, people rather focus on Emulation exclusive builds rather than making things work on this or that Linux distribution.

Mind that when I say certain things aren't available in Raspberry Pi OS, I'm talking about finding them in the App Install/Unisnstall program that comes with it. Other than visiting Redream, PPSSPP, and Retroarch websites, I didn't really confirm that there wasn't a convenient way of getting these things into Raspeberry Pi OS. Oh, I already have a cheap Android smartphone around with the Google Play versions of Retroarch, Redream and PPSSPP. It isn't perfect, but it works for most stuff. If I really, really need to emulate something that won't work in either, I can always emulate into my gaming laptop.... or the Steam Deck.

Generally speaking, I feel that Pi Emulation builds are better if you just build them, fill them up with your games and put them to use. Updating or changings things around regularly tend to be more of a chore, than something really resonable to do.

My interest in having a Desktop + Emulation setup for the Pi is just so that I can leave the tinkering with the Desktop aspect of it always available for me.

Wonder if pi will ever get snapdragons. Then it will be a desktop reckoning. MS lookout! lol

Do you mean something high-end like Snapdragon X Elite?

I guess RPi wants to remain to be an affordable (and low power usage) hobbyist computer, so they select the chips accordingly so that they can push the price under $100 etc.

Still, to me RPi4 (4GB RAM) has always been surprisingly fast considering how cheap it was and how little power it uses (doesn't even need active cooling fans, passive cooling with an aluminum case is enough even for high loads). Apparently the CPU in RPi5 is even several times faster than the one in RPi4, and still runs cool enough for a passive cooling aluminum case to be feasible with it.

I am all for these new ARM-based PCs if they mean less noisy and breaking/dust-collecting active cooling needed, and with laptops much longer battery lives. As long as they are open ecosystems and you can use e.g. Linux if you want to (not sure if the new Snapdragon Surface laptops from Microprose allow that, I presume not).

Of course I want to be able to run my x86 stuff there too, hopefully x86 emulation will be feasible even for games. I rather not deal with SD cards, they are slow and AFAIK have a relatively short livespan if you keep writing to them a lot (swap files etc.). In my current RPi4 setup only /boot is on the SD card, and rest of the Linux OS comes from an external 2TB HDD connected to an USB port. I've been looking to get rid of the SD card altogether and boot directly from the external hard drive, IIRC that should be possible as well.

I'm hoping to some day have a RPi5 equipped with e.g. a 1TB SSD connected directly to it. Wasn't it possible to somehow connect a SSD card directly to RPi5? Not sure if some third-party adapter was needed...

There's already box86 and box64, which can already be used for some games. I saw a video of someone playing Celeste on a Pinebook Pro this way. (Wasn't perfect; apparently the game did crash after the first chapter, and took a few tries to restart, but it did work after that.)

On Android, there's the Winlator app (which you'll need to download from github and sideload, I believe) which allows you to run (some) x86 Windows games on an ARM Android phone. I've heard of Wizardry 8 being played this way, and I've been able to get Realms of Antiquity to work (although, for RoA, you could probably find a native TI99/4A emulator).

I ended up installing Batocera and testing it around a little bit. Works fine, great to see Saturn games running well. PSP isn't quite there yet, but some of it is playable. Didn't test Dreamcast yet.

Anyway... Pi 5 will probably remain a little system for me to tinker and try different things every now and then. Maybe in the future we will be able to keep a normal Linux distribution installed with emulators and frontends running from inside it.

Still looking into this on my RPi4, but by the looks of it, I need to install a 64bit OS (my current Raspbian Buster is 32bit). I don't know if those mentioned "emulator OSes" are 64bit?

Reason being, I wondered why my 18TB USB hard drive (NTFS-formatted) wasn't working correctly with my RPi4. It is detected and it shows the main level of the directory, but if you go deeper where there are lots and lots of (big) files, ls etc. will just give an input/output error, and the GUI file manager just shows those problematic sub directories as empty.

It didn't seem to be a "Linux problem" as my Linux Mint laptop could see those directories just fine.

With googling I found others who have had the same problem (they had the same 18TB WD MyBook USB HDD which they also tried to use with RPi4, wouldn't work even formatted to ext4 filesystem so it wasn't a NTFS Linux issue either), and the reason is that the OS is 32bit, which can apparently see hard drives up to around 16TB or so (I don't know the mathematics behind it, probably something like "number of cylinders or sectors or prism particles goes over 2^32" or something... It gets fixed as long as you install a 64bit OS on your RPi, so I guess I need to reinstall either the 64bit Raspberry OS, or Manjaro or something similar.

Some suggest doing that anyway, claiming it will nowadays give a performance boost to RPi4. I was considering it earlier but back then everyone seemed to say 64bit Raspberry OS still works poorly. I guess I need to take the dive now, and then see how feasible emulation is on the 64bit Raspberry Pi OS. (That 18TB USB HDD has my GOG offline installers BTW, and the meaning is to use the RPi4 as a downloader for any updates for those installers; that is why I want to use it with my RPi4).