Best single board computer for RetroArch in the middle of 2020?

MrShanksio

Hello everyone!

So lately, I've been awfully interested in buying my own SBC, I have some experience with the Pi3 B model, and was wondering since I saw that there is a new variant of the Pi4 with 8g of ram is it worth it? Also, I've seen something called the Orange Pi, which oddly resembles the Raspberry Pi3 but it's wayyyyy cheaper, and it seems interesting as well. Since you guys and girls, have more experience than me which SBC would you recommend, and also another big question, I'm a huge PlayStation fan and would love to rock some PS2 games in my grandparent's house, however I know that not all consoles can be emulated and I don't know if it's possible to emulate it, and if possible on what small computer?

RetiQlum

The Orange Pi is, well not a knock off since it's all open source, but a similar concept. It's better on paper but the software is buggy and there are fewer people working on it since it's not as popular.

As for 8GB on the Pi 4: umm, you are using it for emulating systems that were in the tens of MegaHz processors and tens of Megabyte RAM capable. If you are going really old-school with the Atari 2600 you are look at 1.2 MHz and 128 bytes of RAM.

8GB might be overkill. Unless you are also running other SD cards on it.

It's going to be a long time before you see PS2 games emulated on an SOC. The hardware was really complicated. Amazing for its time (and in some ways better than the PS3) but complex.

This is all opinion.

barbudreadmon

@MrShanksio the 2 best SBCs in 2020 (well, they already were in 2019, before the pi4 was even out) are those 2 :

Odroid N2 => best all rounder (better cpu & gpu than pi4)
Jetson Nano => best gpu, decent cpu (cpu between pi3 & pi4)

NB : idk if retropie can be installed on those SBCs, but that criteria wasn't included in your question, and there are other retrogaming distros with support for those boards.
NB2 : you won't play PS2 on a SBC in 2020, but systems like Dreamcast/Naomi/Atomiswave and Saturn will run fine on the 2 SBCs i mentioned (full speed + upscaling).