Alternate boards to the Ras pi
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I've been using the Raspberry Pi 0-3 for a few years now and have not really looked into alternatives.
The Pi is pretty fantastic especially when considering value for money as it is such a low price board, but I was wondering what other people think the best alternatives are?
Obviously I could just use my PC... But is there anything that offers better emulation for the systems the Pi cannot just quite handle yet (N64, Dreamcast) while still being pocket sized!?
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Uboard,the latest odroid,pine64,and the latest orange pi plus are all faster boards and better for emulation but one thing raspberry pi has that the others don't is really good software support...
And they are also more expansive boards but without good s
Software support its nothing...
Might be better off waiting for the pi 4 unless u want to spend some extra cash...If you live in U.S they just released a awsome arcade retro machine over there I wish I could buy its called a Dreamcade Replay its like a pi same size too but its aloot faster it uses an actual Intel processor dreamcade is 99bux without controller u can just use your own..
To bad I am in EU and I'm not paying 100 shipping besides I'm to poor for that anyways -
What I'd like to know tho is which board offers the best gaming/retro gaming experience
Im still searching for that one hehe
By the looks of it Raspberry is still the way to go?? -
Probably it doesn't qualify as a single-board PC, and it is certainly not cheap, but in case your main concern is size, I have my ES+RA system on a MSI Cubi htpc with an i3 cpu, and it totally rocks. It's not as tiny as a RPi but it's quite portable (115 x 111 x 35mm), and the performance is astounding. I can even play Saturn games at full speed, which I'm told it's near impossible on a RPi.
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There is a version of retropie for the orange pi. It's called RetrOrangePI and as far as I can tell it works just as well as Retropie for the raspberry pi. I have only seen the $10 board used though. There is a board that is "on spec" (amount of ram and cpu speed) as the pi but it's $22 I think and ddr3 ran instead of "plain ddr" ram as the rasp pi 3. The gpu is better on the pi...i think. That is as much as I know though.
We just have to wait and see.
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/12238/raspberry-pi-4-will-it-ever-happen/11
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/10344/raspberry-pi-4-place-your-bets-here/52
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@svmariscal said in Alternate boards to the Ras pi:
MSI Cubi htpc
What saturn emulator do you use? I want to play some saturn games, but I thought it was a dead end on the emulation scene?
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@spruce_m00se said in Alternate boards to the Ras pi:
@svmariscal said in Alternate boards to the Ras pi:
MSI Cubi htpc
What saturn emulator do you use? I want to play some saturn games, but I thought it was a dead end on the emulation scene?
I am using the mednafen_saturn retroarch core. I have only tested with Panzer Dragoon and Sega Rally so far (ReDump images), but both games run like a charm. Bear in mind I have no firsthand experience with the Sega Saturn, but my impression is that both of them run very fluidly with no glitches that I could notice.
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@svmariscal I just tried yabuse on an i7 with 16gb of ram and it hogs almost 100% CPU. runs very poorly.
I may try mednafen, is there a decent guide to how to set it up ?
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Supposing you have already Emulationstation + Retroarch running, you first have to enter the Retroarch menu and download the mednafen_saturn core. Then you need to paste this:
<system>
<fullname>Sega Saturn</fullname>
<name>saturn</name>
<path>~.emulationstation\roms\saturn</path> this is the path to your roms directory
<extension>.iso .ISO .mdf .MDF .cue .CUE</extension>
<command>%HOME%.emulationstation\systems\retroarch\retroarch.exe -L %HOME%.emulationstation\systems\retroarch\cores\mednafen_saturn_libretro.dll "%ROM_RAW%"</command> this is where you tell ES what core to use
<platform>saturn</platform>
<theme>saturn</theme>
</system>in your es_systems.cfg file; beware of slashes/backslashes and all depending of which OS you're running.
Secondly, you'll need to put the proper BIOS file in the retroarch/system directory, see here:
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Saturn
And then of course you need to put all your roms in your roms directory.
If you don't want to go the retroarch route, I guess you can use the standalone mednafen but I have no experience with it.
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