Pi5 vs Mini PC?

nemo93

Hello Everyone,

I hope you're all fine. I was about to get a Pi5 when I noticed the price tag. Roughly $100-130 with power plug+case. Not far from some (entry level) Mini PC based on Intel N95/N100. I'm looking to emulate the following fullspeed:

Saturn
PS2
Windows 98 (Dosbox-X?)
MAME/Arcade 3D games like Virtua Fighter

I intend to install only emulation stuff on that new Pi/Mini PC - it will be dedicated to that task. Budget is unlimited. One important constraint > device must be 100% silent/fanless.

I wonder what would be the best option? Bonus question: can Retropie be installed on a Mini PC/x86-based? Feedback with facts/numbers appreciated :)

Thanks a lot!

retropieuser555

@nemo93 x86, computer based options will be your best bet for PS2. PS2 will probably remain a curiosity on pi 5 unless there's some significant driver developments, but that will take a few years realistically

mitu

@nemo93 said in Pi5 vs Mini PC?:

Roughly $100-130 with power plug+case

Only if you go for the 8Gb model, which is a bit overkill just for emulation.

Not far from some (entry level) Mini PC based on Intel N95/N100. I'm looking to emulate the following fullspeed:..

Such mini pc won't emulate PS2 and Saturn full speed. If can invest more and target an AMD APU based on a recent model and maybe PS2 will be full speed.

Bonus question: can Retropie be installed on a Mini PC/x86-based?

Yes - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Debian/.

PS2 will probably remain a curiosity on pi 5 unless there's some significant driver developments, but that will take a few years realistically

Pi5 will not be 100% fullspeed on PS2 even if David Copperfield writes the drivers.

hooperre

@mitu 5600G will play PS3 (I assume). My 5700G ran RPCS3 pretty much the same as my 6700XT / 5800X3D build.

Edit: Even the 4600G will play RPCS3 not at full speed but under $100 from what I'm seeing online, but I'd spring for the $130 5600G.

mitu

@hooperre Yes, something like that. It costs more, but it's also much more powerful and - in a mini factor - take less space than a full blown PC.

yserra

I use Retropie both on a Raspberry Pi 4B and on an Intel NUC NUC8i7HVK (a PC with CPU Core i7 @3.1/4.2 GHz, 16 GB of RAM, GPU Radeon RX Vega M GH, silent/fanless).

The limit with the Raspberry Pi 4B are the Sony PSP, the Sega Dreamcast, and the N64 : the games are "quite" playable, but with some slowdown or some sound bugs.

On the NUC, Saturn, N64, Dreamcast, PSP, MAME/Arcade 3D games like Virtua Fighter run very fast. I didn't try PS2 games.

Forget Windows 98. On the Raspberry Pi 4B, even Windows 3.1 is just not usable with DosBox. On the NUC, Windows 3.1 runs OK. But nothing more. Actually, even on my Mac M1 Max with 64GB of RAM, I can't run Windows 98 under DosBox-X...

What you should know is that Retropie on Raspberry Pi is very stable, while it's quite difficult to maintain on the PC.

The problem on the NUC is not Retropie, it's the fact that you must install Retropie upon a Linux Ubuntu which updates very often and each time with some loss of backwards compatibility.

Every time there's a major update of Ubuntu, you're quite sure it will break something into Retropie (sound, full screen...) and you will have hours to spend to understand how to repair it.

In addition, at every update of Retropie on the PC, the new software is built from the source code, so you will have to wait a looooong time before everything installs. On Raspberry Pi, you install binaries instantly.

I use my NUC to play Ridge Racer or Tekken on the PSP and the Raspberry Pi to play with everything else that is older.

mitu

@yserra said in Pi5 vs Mini PC?:

The problem on the NUC is not Retropie, it's the fact that you must install Retropie upon a Linux Ubuntu which updates very often and each time with some loss of backwards compatibility.

To mitigate this, use either Debian stable (which has a faster release cycle these days) or an Ubuntu LTS release (20.04 now, with 24.04 just released). You can still upgrade to a newer release of the distro once every 2 years and you'd probably have a few things to fix at that time.

quicksilver

@yserra said in Pi5 vs Mini PC?:

On the Raspberry Pi 4B, even Windows 3.1 is just not usable with DosBox.

This is not true. I have windows 3.1 running great on my pi4 just fine. In fact I have it running on my pi 3 as well.

Dosbox does require a fair amount of configuring to get running smoothly so I would assume you have something set wrong that is causing performance issues.

yserra

@quicksilver I'm open to any advice to make Windows 3.1 running smoothy. Could you share your .conf file?

Here is mine:

[cpu]
cycles = max

[midi]
mpu401     = intelligent
mididevice = fluidsynth

[gus]
gus = true

[speaker]
pcspeaker = true

[dos]
xms = true
ems = true
umb = true

[autoexec]
PATH C:\WINDOWS;C:\APPS\WORD
PATH C:\APPS\NC;%PATH%
SET PATH=U:\;%PATH%
LH doskey
C:
C:\WINDOWS\SMARTDRV.EXE /L
C:\WINDOWS\FAKESHAR.COM
DEVICE C:\WINDOWS\IFSHLP.SYS
C:\WINDOWS\net start
SET TEMP=C:\WINDOWS\TEMP

Ashpool

@quicksilver said in Pi5 vs Mini PC?:

This is not true. I have windows 3.1 running great on my pi4 just fine. In fact I have it running on my pi 3 as well.

Well, and if one is not restricted to retropie per se (though it is/was possible to install dosbox-x under retropie), dosbox-x is optimized for windows installs before XP, or better to say predating ME (really, no one wanted that one). At least on a Pi4, running Win95B within Dosbox-X (without utilizing 3dfx) runs pretty smooth/well for games of that era [edit: at least as smooth as they run in their time on affordable systems of that time, only drawback is the 3dfx support which is at its best under winows with dgvoodoo2 or nglide (time for a 3dfx vulkan wrapper under *nix systems!)].

yserra

@Ashpool
How do you install Dosbos-X on Retropie?
The doc doesn't mention it.
I don't have it in Retropie-setup.
The link you gave is about Dosbox Staging (which I use).

I see some option to install it aside of Retropie, meaning not running it from EmulationStation but from the Desktop environment. Obviously it would make it "possible" on Raspberry Pi, but not really included in Retropie. If the goal is to quit Retropie to run it, I would prefer to emulate Windows 3.11/98 from a real desktop computer, as my Ubuntu PC or my Mac (this is what I already do, by the way).

Ashpool

@yserra said in Pi5 vs Mini PC?:

How do you install Dosbos-X on Retropie?

Build/Compile it from the commandline and adding it as a system on its own (see the docs) or add it to the emulator.cfg for the existing DOS(-Box) System. And yes my first link was the official DOSBox thread, but directed to a post where I ranted about my 3dfx experience with DOSBox-ECE and DOSBox-X (as IIRC none of the DBox-variants included in the retropie-setup-scripts incorporate a 3dfx layer/wrapper). More important in that post of mine (that was why I linked to it) was the observation, that though dosbox-x may be run outside an x environment (btw. retropie/the commandline in emulator.cfg can start emulators via xinit), if usescancodes is true, the values for the "keys" whence run in "headless mode" is shifted by 8 compared to the ones obtained from within an x-environment.

mitu

@Ashpool @yserra please take this to a separate topic.

quicksilver

@yserra your .conf file doesn't look complete. I'll post mine when I have a chance for comparison. It may be beneficial to start a new topic however since this conversation doesn't really fit with the original topic.