Now Available on the Raspberry Pi 4

Back in July the first video of redream running on the Raspberry Pi 4b was posted. The plan at the time was to release it within 2 weeks, but other priorities came up and getting the Pi release to production quality was put on hold.

While those 2 short weeks has now turned into a long 5 months, today we're releasing the first downloads for the Raspberry Pi 4b. This release is the product of all the work that's went into optimizing for Android, and as a result the current build is running twice as fast as the build from the video in July. This first release provides stable, full speed emulation in most games and the same user experience as all of our other supported platforms.

Take a quick look at a sample of games running on it:

How Does It Perform

In the video multiple games were sampled in order to showcase a range of performance demands. Most games run full speed (often with enough headroom to run at 120+ hz when using turbo) but some more demanding games still exhibit minor hiccups.

The hiccups are generally short and the automatic frame skipping kicks in keep emulation running at full speed. Examples of this can be seen in Sonic Adventure 2 during the downhill portion of City Escape, or when the taxi jumps over the first hill in Crazy Taxi. There are a few edge cases such as Mars Matrix that still aren't full speed; we'll get to those soon.

Please note that rendering at anything higher than the native resolution is not going to run at full speed right now.

How To Run It

There are binaries available on the downloads page for users running 32-bit Raspbian. Download the archive, extract it and double click the file named redream and you're ready to go.

You may notice that the build currently includes more files than our normal Linux builds; there's a mesa subdirectory, a redream.elf and the main redream shell script. The reason for the extra files is that there are some optimizations we are working on that are important for performance, but the changees haven't yet been upstreamed to Mesa. Because of this, a build of the modified v3d driver is temporarily bundled with the Raspberry Pi builds. We'll get the changes upstreamed soon, but we wanted to get a build out as soon as possible for people to enjoy over the Holidays.