Raspberry Pi - Recommended?
I've been meaning to play around with Batocera for some time, and today I decided to do so. I've been banging my head against it for a couple of hours now. I expect there's something I'm missing, so I wanted to go over some things here.
- I have a Raspberry Pi 5b that I purchased about a year ago. I was using it at work for some project testing and have finally reclaimed it (this is what made me decide to finally play around with Batocera).
- After downloading and flashing Batocera 42 and booting up for the first time I paired an Xbox Series X controller and started looking through the settings.
- I enabled WiFi and entered my SSID and password. It never connected/got an IP address.
- I rebooted the device, and upon reboot not only did it still not connect to WiFi, but the Xbox controller would no longer connect/pair with it either.
- I disabled WiFi and rebooted the device, and never did get the Xbox controller to pair.
- I also could not get any network connectivity on the device with a wired connection.
At this point I gave up on trying on the Pi5, thinking maybe it was just a bit too new and the Batocera image was still being worked on for that platform. I grabbed a Raspberry Pi 4b device I've had for years, downloaded and flashed the 4b image onto it, and booted it up.
- The first thing I noticed was no audio. I have it connected to a small monitor with internal speakers. After digging into it for about an hour I had to do the following to get it working:
- Edit config.txt to switch dtoverlay from KMS to FKMS, uncomment hdmi_force_hotplug=1 and hdmi_drive=2
- Edit cmdline.txt to add video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080@60D to force digital audio on the first HDMI port
- I successfully paired the Xbox controller, and tried setting up WiFi. Once again, I could not get any networking to function (either WiFi or wired). Both this unit and the 5b work fine with a Raspberry Pi OS image on the card. On the plus side, I never lost my controller pairing throughout the testing.
- Thinking that the networking system was thoroughly borked, I reflashed my card, made my HDMI/FKMS changes to the config files before the first boot, plugged in the wired ethernet, and booted up. Audio worked fine as expected, but I still cannot get an IP on the wired ethernet.
Is the Pi just not a reliable platform for Batocera? I'd tried to use it once 4 or 5 years ago and had audio issues then as well (I was trying to plug it into a receiver and believe the issue would have been resolved with the edits I did today). Historically I've only used Retropie on my 3b and 4b devices and didn't have any issues like this.
If this is something that can be resolved I'd like to do so, as following what the team has done has been inspirational. I'm just assuming I'm using the wrong platform to give it a shot as this has been pretty disheartening so far. Thanks to everyone.