Waited for it for six months and had high expectations for it, it disappointed me
Tried wine emulation with two of my favorite childhood games, Need for speed underground 2 and Midtown Madness 2, neither worked well
They work but the resolution is never right and more than half the window is missing, tried many ways to fix that, nothing did it for me, it only shows the upper corner of the games no matter what I try
Went with GameCube emulation, runs terribly
Let alone the god awful trackball even with some updated software I found online
I really had high hopes for this device, this is sad
Sad to hear. Was gaming your primary motivation for getting it? I’ve been happy using mine as a daily driver even with the stock cm4. For light office/browsing/torrenting its been great.
Are you into radio stuff at all? There’s some interesting aftermarket mods for SDR work
I can honestly get you. If your reasoning for getting it was gaming I think you will be disappointed.
But I will be straight to say, Hackergadgets NVME/Battery module is a must together with a good NVME drive. I’ve tried without both and its was tedious with performance and boot.
BUT using the NVME/Battery module increases the performance ALLOT.
(and the power requirements)
For gaming there are better alternatives, also cheaper, and will stick with @henstooth tip about selling it if you just want to play..
I have used for gaming but just as an excuse to slam my head to the several problems related and learn something.
As said NVME is mandatory.
I use cm5 with 4k page size. In the nix repo it’s not in the cache so you have to compile the kernel every time (5 hours with some ice to avoid thermal shut down, or cross compiling.. still a lot of time).
Also you will have to find some emulators more updated than the ones in retroarch, some of them should be installed independently… So a lot of effort. Didn’t tried Dolphin yet but some people managed to have it working smoothly so it’s not hardware limitation.
The very good point for me is the fresh implementation of fex as compatibility layer in steam for ARM.. we will se how it will work on cm5.
I’ll try to make use of it for other things that aren’t gaming oriented, and I know plenty will hate my guts for this but I’m from Israel, selling and shipping and the whole currency conversion is a huge hassle to deal with and quite risky and things do cost more to obtain here compared to the rest of the world
The whole build did cost me 600 euros (Samsung 35E 18650 cells and Raspberry pi cm5 16gb ram and 32gb emmc)
I’ll leave it be for a week or so and see about getting into radio stuff and using it as a daily driver as mentioned
if you wanted something for gaming why not buy a dedicated emulation device like a Miyoo or AYN Thor? the RPi has never been a device that excels at emulation, especially with anything past SNES/GBA, so not sure what you expected performance wise from a Wine emulation on UConsole. screen is not designed for gaming, heavy, not the greatest battery life, and even the heat issues with the CM5.
Replace the trackball quickly and easily with this one…
Easily removed from this module, drop it into your uconsole (ensure the tiny pins align with the holes in your circuit board). Yes it needs an alchohol wipe every 2 weeks or so to remove finger grease but much better than the one supplied !!.
hehe, I get that its though with €600 out and realising this.
I figure I am in the same range and I just got mine 3-4 weeks ago. Still need to upgrade some things so the investment will increase.
If you are willing still do some upgrades you can expand the possibilities quite allot. NVMe/Battery module from hackergadgets will increase your IO speed.
(remember, the type of NVMe matters also)
Heatpads will help with thermal throttling.
But it is still a great device and you can already to plenty without the radios.
i.e I have Rex’es Trixie image installed and have just tried Kismet with the internal CM5 Bluetooth and Wifi.
Bloody brutal as only 20 min gave me 500 Wifi networks and around 50 bluetooth devices
It’s out of stock, won’t blackberry’s trackballs give any improvement at all? I’ve seen it somewhere that people are recommending the white ones off a blackberry phone
I understand you totally, and nobody here will hate you for this because uConsole is quite a polarizing product.
But if I may suggest, I think you may want to try Fceux for some NES games. I personally have had no issue with it and the experience is acceptable.
The gamepad is not as good as some other consoles, but it does the job. Although I have broken one keyboard and has docked it for two weeks, Alex did send me a new set of keyboard free of charge (you do pay for the shipping, which is several euros, so basically free of charge). The customer service is there, not timely, but there nonetheless.
Well, I hope you could have fun tinkering with it!
I’ll try NES games, Alex is actually sending me a replacement motherboard for it, mine has a problem with the dimm slot clips not locking the cm5 adapter into place, I had to design and 3d print a latch for it, been also tinkering around with the idea of adding a touch screen to it and analog sticks and whatnot. I’ll post about those of I do make them happen, with possible STLs and tutorials
It may be easier or faster to load Need for Speed: Underground 2 for GameCube in Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator.
A good hacker has exploited race conditions enough not to be vulnerable to them; society has historically punished hackers with alienation for their frequent pursuit of “dangerous knowledge” so much that it should be obviously counter-productive to perpetuate or extend the practice of societal alienation. So discriminatory hackers are total posers and you can safely ignore them.
I also recommend PlayStation games. Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, and Driver all should work decently on the CM4.
I use my Uconsole a lot for gaming with pico8, which it is pretty well the perfect platform for. In fact, pico8 was one of the main reasons I bought the thing because the Pocket C.H.I.P. I had been using for pico8 was getting pretty long in the tooth.
