Pine64 vs Pi3

LiqwdE

Just read an article about pine 64. They released a new wave of product. While you need to purchase the baseboard $15 and the compute module $29. The board is fitted with a 64bit quad core processor and 2gb of ddr3 ram.

I need to get some more specs on this like size comparison but what do you guys think? How much better would this be for projects like n64, ps1, dream cast, etc...

moosepr

@LiqwdE they also make an all in one too

https://www.pine64.org/?product=pine-a64-board-2gb

think it was a kickstarter success story

LiqwdE

@moosepr

OK moose, I'm just gonna email you from now on before I open my mouth. Your just full of good info lol

moosepr

@LiqwdE ha ha ha im full of something, not sure it is always good info :P

LiqwdE

@moosepr

Think retropie would even run on Pine64? I know alot of the coding is probably specific to the chip set, ram, etc...

moosepr

@LiqwdE looking at there wiki, it looks like they have a version of jessie available for it, so im sure installing retropi/emulationstation onto that would be painless enough

http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pine_A64_Software_Release

BuZz

@moosepr it's not supported. I doubt it would be painless.

moosepr

@BuZz appologies, i assumed (without actually researching) that if someone had gotten Debian Jessie working, then the necessary 'driver' hurdles had already been overcome

BuZz

@moosepr no worries - just wanted to clarify before people go out and buy one and then come to complain that it doesn't work :) Although the OS is the same, the vendor drivers differ, and support generally needs to be added to any hardware that doesn't use a standard like "OpenGL" on top of "X11".

eg odroid-c1/c2 use mali (we run it on the framebuffer with mali-fbdev and a custom sdl2 etc - and use specific build options for some programs).

Pine64 a64 also uses mali, but they may well not ship with the mali-fbdev packages we expect. Even if they do we would also need to have some code in to recognise the board and so on. It most certainly would require some code work. I don't have one of these boards, so I can't say for sure.

moosepr

@BuZz that makes sense!! i guess i have spent too long in a 'windows' world, where if the OS supports the hardware, most software does too

LiqwdE

@moosepr
@BuZz

Great info, I'll scour the net when I get some time. See if there is any forums doing emulations on Pine64. Guess I need to start learning more about Linux. Lol