YaYa's first GBZ - Kite's SAIO - Big Battery - NO Glue - Custom 3D parts - DC Jack - minimum case mod

[YaYa]

I have no problem to hold the battery. I am encountering some issues to maintain a good contact between the pogo pins and the battery.
I’m trying another update of my pogo pin holder.
To tell you shortly, i have shaved some small bits to allow the part to sit 1 mm down. Then i reversed the pogo upside down (and reversed also the cables to respect polarity) i fed up the rear of the 3D part with VHB to stick it upside down for testing purposes.

This manipulation allows me to have the pins in the good angle so they can bend without deformation when the battery is going down.

Now that i know this way is better, i’m going to rework the model to add a step on the rear (this will prevent me from filling with 3mm VHB lol) and i will add a wall on the rear.

Why a wall ? because the design and the followed path is good but with many in and outs, the pogo pins slightly goes back in the case and then i have some connection lost when playing.

I really want to keep the grinding of the case very tight because i don’t want the battery to move.

I’ll deal with the 3D model this weekend and post it here.
I’m for now away on a trip for my job so i’m a bit lazy and just want to play

[Billy Blaze]

You can in many maners speed up you booting time. [...]
checking the parse only scrapped games and some other stuff in gamelist option within emulation station, will also speed up the boot time. I am about to desactivate all of this because i realize that our tiny screens does not allow us to have a decent theme with plenty of information like last played time, total count and so... so disabling the save metadata will save more writes, more power and ectend battery life, sd card life, and allow faster shutdowns

I have designed a theme with a very reduced amount of information. I was wondering whether I need to manually modify the gamelist.xml file to speed up the booting process? (the screen reads nearly none of the meta information which is however still stored in the xml file.)

minimalist themeShow

[YaYa]

I’m not an expert on themes and emulation station but the metadata in the gamelist.xml is what allows you to have the game selection menu per system basis, so modifying it won’t be good as you will break your configuration.
If you want to make it light, you must delete games and it will automatically delete the entries in the gamelist.xml
You can also speed up by
- Enabling Parse gamelists only (this will delete any custom entry in the menus)
- Disabling shownhidden files

[YaYa]

Read the Why does shut down and reboot take ages? article

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/FAQ

[YaYa]

The only issue i’m having with disabling save metadata on exit is the favorites collection. It is not anymore saved so any changes to addition or deletion is lost... this is really annoying so for now, the option is still enabled as this is a new system, i have retropie for the first time so i don’t have a fully configured system with all my favorite games filtered...

[Billy Blaze]

ah, I didn't knew about the Save Metadata On Exit and Parse Gamelists Only options. thanks for the link! this should speed up the boot and shutdown process. gonna test this soon...

if you know what you are doing, editing the gamelist.xml won't break any of your configurations. but I wouldn't recommend this sort of tweaks for the average user.
In my test set I deleted all unnecessary (scraped) info for one of my systems (GBA) and it still works fine. (xml file size before: 17kb, after: 4kb) I still have to test if any of this will speed up things noticeably.

[YaYa]

Oh didn't understand what you meant... You are for example deleting release dates, genres, description and this kind of stuff ?
This is a hastling process ... i would love to but this is too much time lol

[shesaysidontlisten]

I have no problem to hold the battery. I am encountering some issues to maintain a good contact between the pogo pins and the battery.
I’m trying another update of my pogo pin holder.
To tell you shortly, i have shaved some small bits to allow the part to sit 1 mm down. Then i reversed the pogo upside down (and reversed also the cables to respect polarity) i fed up the rear of the 3D part with VHB to stick it upside down for testing purposes.

This manipulation allows me to have the pins in the good angle so they can bend without deformation when the battery is going down.

Now that i know this way is better, i’m going to rework the model to add a step on the rear (this will prevent me from filling with 3mm VHB lol) and i will add a wall on the rear.

Why a wall ? because the design and the followed path is good but with many in and outs, the pogo pins slightly goes back in the case and then i have some connection lost when playing.

I really want to keep the grinding of the case very tight because i don’t want the battery to move.

I’ll deal with the 3D model this weekend and post it here.
I’m for now away on a trip for my job so i’m a bit lazy and just want to play

YaYa, did you ever finish with your refitting of the battery bay? Your design is the reason I bought Pogo pins and the same batteries. I haven't started grinding Down the Walls of the battery compartment yet, so if you have any measurements or 3D printed parts that make things work better, please post them!

Edit: I also wanted to thank you for all the optimization stuff! Once I have a functional GBZ I'm going through every one of those settings.

[Billy Blaze]

Oh didn't understand what you meant... You are for example deleting release dates, genres, description and this kind of stuff ?
This is a hasting process ... i would love to but this is too much time lol

yes, I deleted everything except for the path to the rom and the path to the image, plus the name of the game. via RegEx the "find and replace" method took me less then a minute. this is how it looks like:

beforeShow

Code: Select all

	<game>
		<path>./Super Mario World (E) (V1.1) [!].smc</path>
		<name>Super Mario World</name>
		<desc>Revisit the magic and fun of the classic Super Mario Bros. series on your Super NES!  Play through Super Mario World, plus all the great Super Mario Bros. games for the NES have been powered up with 16-bit graphics and sound and collected on one super game pak.  As an added bonus, the previously unreleased “Lost Levels” are included.  These super challenging courses have never been available in this country until now!
		* Five great games in one game pak!  Play through Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 2, Super Mario Bros. 3 &amp; Super Mario World!
		* Battery backed memory saves up to 4 players’ progress through every game!
		* Play alone or 2 players can alternate play!
		* New 16-bit graphics, sound, and other surprises!</desc>
		<image>~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/snes/Super Mario World (E) (V1.1) [!]-image.jpg</image>
		<rating>0.8</rating>
		<releasedate>19931216T000000</releasedate>
		<developer>Nintendo</developer>
		<publisher>Nintendo</publisher>
		<genre>Platform</genre>
		<players>2</players>
		<playcount>3</playcount>
		<lastplayed>20170615T145740</lastplayed>
	</game>

afterShow

Code: Select all

	<game>
		<path>./Super Mario World (E) (V1.1) [!].smc</path>
		<name>Super Mario World</name>
		<image>~/.emulationstation/downloaded_images/snes/Super Mario World (E) (V1.1) [!]-image.jpg</image>
	</game>

BUT the outcome isn't noticeable at all.

what speeds up the booting process are things you've already mentioned, like turning off Wifi, removing Samba Shares, disabling to wait for LAN and stuff like that.
additionally I added a heat-sink and overclocked my Pi Zero slightly which gives me a little bit of extra boost. here are my specs.

test this on your own risk!Show

make sure to read this article first:
https://github.com/retropie/RetroPie-Se ... erclocking

Code: Select all

arm_freq=1050
gpu_freq=500
core_freq=500
sdram_freq=500
sdram_schmoo=0x02000020
over_voltage=2
sdram_over_voltage=2

[YaYa]

I have also overclocked the Pi with the same specs but 1000 instead of 1050 for the arm_freq. I am not sure this will gives you something more and you must know that the pi zero cpu is a boosted version of the pi 1 already, which was a 700Mhz version, so it is almost at his limits already