Question Can you expand the memory on a Raspberry Pi 2GB board ?

[drjohnnyfever]

I have a little game renderer, one of those Amazon Specials, with all the 1980's arcade games and consoles on a micro sd card. It's a little jumpy on the more modern games and I was wondering if there is a way to add memory to it or expand to a better gpu or whatever might be possible to make it perform a little better? I'm asking from a point of total ignorance on anything Raspberry Pi.

I was able to figure out without taking it apart that it is a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 2GB variant. But that's all I know.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

Memory is soldered to the board and is not removable/replaceable by the user (unless you are well skilled in surface mount soldering. They are purchased as 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB and used as is.

 

[TerryLaze]

I have a little game renderer,

??
SD card?

Because larger games need to read a lot more data and a slow sd card will cause longer waits, but it's not a guarantee, it might just be the best the pi can do.
You can watch a few youtube videos on pi emulation, that will show if your games run worse then they do for others.
Also the OS (frontend) they load into can have an affect on how games play, some are even made to do some overclocking on the pi and will make it run somewhat better.

 

[drjohnnyfever]

??
SD card?

Because larger games need to read a lot more data and a slow sd card will cause longer waits, but it's not a guarantee, it might just be the best the pi can do.
You can watch a few youtube videos on pi emulation, that will show if your games run worse then they do for others.
Also the OS (frontend) they load into can have an affect on how games play, some are even made to do some overclocking on the pi and will make it run somewhat better.

I didn't consider that part. I'll look into it.

??
SD card?

Because larger games need to read a lot more data and a slow sd card will cause longer waits, but it's not a guarantee, it might just be the best the pi can do.
You can watch a few youtube videos on pi emulation, that will show if your games run worse then they do for others.
Also the OS (frontend) they load into can have an affect on how games play, some are even made to do some overclocking on the pi and will make it run somewhat better.

Yeah, so the soldering was what I was wondering about. Could another ram just be added to the existing? Like soldered on top or the bottom of the board?
Can you elaborate a little on the frontend and if I might be able to update that?

As I said, this is out of my knowledge zone. I'm going to get it going this weekend on a different tv, so any info about settings or other things I might want to look at first would be appreciated.

I'm still interested in understanding the ram upgrade. It seems that this is a variant of a 4gb or 8gb board.

 

[BFG-9000]

The most direct swap would be to go from 2GB to 4GB. 8GB is possible but the factory 8GB models came with an additional VRM so stability would be unknown. 16GB is probably not possible. There's only one spot for RAM so you would have to remove the original x32 chip + replace with a compatible one. And unless you can DIY it would make much more sense to just buy an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 and swap it in.

Note that performance is equivalent to a dozen-year old tablet so the amount of RAM may not actually be what's limiting, given that tablets back then only had 2GB. So it may be best of all to buy a newer emulator based on the much faster Raspberry Pi 5

 

[drjohnnyfever]

Ok, that sounds reasonable. I imagine the mini sd card that came with it is what has the emulator on it, so would merely obtaining the newest unit allow me to simply put the card in and play? Or is there programming or putting some kind of OS on the Pi that would be required too? I think I'm more comfortable with doing that than removing and resoldering.

 

[Moonstick2]

To clarify this a bit more, it sounds like you've bought some 8-bit game emulator from Amazon, that you plug into your TV and can play various old games on. It's a bit jumpy on some of the more modern games, and you've taken it apart and discovered that it's got an RPi 4 2 GB inside and you're wondering about replacing it. Is that all correct?

If it is, then for one thing I'd say almost certainly you wouldn't be able to just put the SD card into a Pi 5. Usually when the card is flashed with an OS, even a gaming one (e.g. RetroPi) then it needs to know what version of the Pi it's destined for and it installs the OS accordingly.

Secondly, without knowing the provenance and general legitimacy of this overall gaming package, I wouldn't like to say that it's a hardware issue that you can solve with a Pi and not a software issue caused by a buggy emulator. Or it might be just the games themselves, how modern is modern? The Pi 5 struggles with GameCube games for instance. But you've said 1980s: even the Pi 1 could do Megadrive (Genesis) games, so we're back it being a software issue, not hardware.

If you've got a Pi4 2 GB in a little hardware case to make it a retro console, a better hobby might be to get your own SD Card and experiment with getting it set up with an emulator yourself. Don't delete the old card, but I do think your solution is more likely to be in changing the software than the hardware.