New to Raspberry and RetroPie - Which Pi (3, 4 or 5) ?
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Hi,
I'm planning to join the fun world of retro gaming with a Pi and going to buy a first Raspberry Pi starter kit. I read on many posts that Pi 5 was not yet officially supported, but mainly work, and Pi4b is working well, even without 8Gb of RAM but the 3 looks even having more compatibility (https://retropie.org.uk/stats/pkgflags/).
So I'm not sure if I should buy a Pi3, that is getting old, a Pi4 or a 5 ?
If Pi5, does it going to be stable enough ?
What would you recommend for a newbie, with some computer knowledge, to purchase as a good starter kit ? new Pi5 with 8b ? a Pi4b with 8Gb or even 4Gb? a Pi 3?
Or should I even go with a Pandora Box ?
Goal is to play old console games up to PS1, or potentially PS2, and mostly old arcade games.
Thanks for your recommendation. -
Is Playstation 1 is the upper limit, hardware wise even a Raspberry Pi 3B+ is enough. PS2 is a lot more demanding and even a Pi5 is not enough to make it full speed.
RAM is not as important as far as emulation goes, so you don't need 8Gb - 2Gb is more than enough even with a Pi4. -
I don't think it's worth buying a pi4/2GB when pi5/2GB are available and affordable.
Furthermore, "old arcade games" is a very vague concept, and some of them might be very demanding, so a pi5 would definitely help with that. -
On the information given I would lean towards a Pi4.
You have a ready made environment, a lot of documentation and many users which are in the same boat as you. The PS1 emulation works very well. Also Arcade games up to mid of 1990s will be fine.
You can also squeeze out a little bit more power if needed with overclocking.With a Pi5, albeit having more horsepower, be prepared to learn RetroPie from the trenches. As you can see it this platform is still in frequent discussion here and there is no readymade image yet.
I started with a Pi3 my first arcade setup (as there was nothing else around), but I would not start with it again (in short: too many limitations for my requirements). If at all I would consider a PiZero2 which plays roughly in the same performance league but has a more modern graphics stack.
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