I spent the last week getting the new RetroPie images working on the PJ adapter. This is the first RetroPie release with Raspberry Pi4 support.
Unfortunately it wasn’t easy and it didn’t turn out well. The new release messes up the classification of my joystick driver, configuring it as a mouse. It somehow breaks scaling in vertical mode that I was not able to resolve. It removes useful emulators like mame2003 (from Pi1/Zero image at least), adds emulators that don’t run well on a Pi1/2/Zero. Raspberry Pi 4 has emulation sprite / background tearing and jitter issues when scrolling, with all emulation cores it seems. Then there are minor annoyances like the new video driver stack and changes to the PCM audio on the GPIO.
I did what I could at this time, adding emus and configuring everything to work, but some deal breaker issues remain, mainly scaling in vertical mode and Pi4 graphics jitter.
For this reason, vertical images will not be available for now. If using Pi3 or lower, stick with the 4.5.1 images at the moment. If buying a Pi for this, go with a Pi3. Honestly there is little reason to go with RetroPie 4.7.1 right now that I can see. If you already have a Pi4, try the 4.7.1 and let me know how it goes.
While Retropie is great for consoles, many of you want a good arcade emulation experience, and Retropie is not that. I will therefore spend the next while working on a stand alone minimalist MAME image as some have requested. It will be small and will boot straight to a game, with proper video mode setup to avoid any scaling issues. Much work has already been completed. More on this in the next post.