Newbie question - What can be emulated one what?

edale

OK, I know this is a bit of a noob question, but I'd say that's acceptable considering my first Raspberry Pis will be coming in the mail in a few days (though I do have a good deal of experience with emulation on: Windows PC, the original Xbox, PSP, Wii, and Nintendo DS).

What I'm hoping for is a list of all of the game systems that can be emulated perfectly using RetroPie 4.2, with both a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a Raspberry Pi 3b (I ordered both) without any overclocking and without the need for a keyboard or mouse.

Basically the systems where I can just dump the entire ROMset in and not have to worry about testing to make sure each game works properly. And the setups I'm building would ideally never need a keyboard or mouse attached after the initial setup (just a PS3, Xbox 360, or 8bitdo NES30 pro game controller), so systems like Commodore 64 (which uses a keyboard), or intellivision (which uses a really wierd 9-button controller that needs to be individually mapped for each game) wouldn't be on the list.

Thanks for the help!

BAZLOCO

Hi,

The full list of systems are on the wiki

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki

herb_fargus

@edale the answer is technically none.

No emulator is perfect, and in order to be as close to perfect as it can be you'd need at least a 3Ghz machine just for the SNES. Some games work well on some emulators, and not others, you'll just have to see how they work as you play them (and let's be honest nobody has the time to play 30,000 plus games... Much more manageable to just pick the games you'll play)

The pi 3 will run better than the pi 0.

edale

OK, how about a list of consoles that need either a keyboard, mouse, or non-standard controller type (aka intellivision)? So I at least won't have to bother trying to test those systems.

Though I do guess 'perfect' was a bad word to use on an emulation forum, perhaps "fully playable" would have been a better word choice. I'd be perfectly fine with a speed-hacked emulator like ZSNES vs perfect emulation like BSNES, as long as the majority of the games are actually playable without lots of glitching.

edmaul69

@edale some of the apple iie, zx spectrum, some of the commodore 64, some of the msx, some of the colecovision, some of the intellivision, atari 5200, not sure exactly with ti-99 as i dont have it but i assume its a no go, dosbox, most ports. channel f and astrocade and other advance mess systems require a keyboard to configure the controller and display the first time for each system. Those are the ones i know of.

edale

@BAZLOCO The problem with that list (and I actually view it as a MAJOR problem) is that it lists every system retropie can emulate on every platform.

It does NOT give you a list of what emulators are actually on which platform, which is especially bad given it's primary userbase is using the most limited of the supported systems (Raspberry Pi).

Now if rather than having to click on each of the 50ish systems to see if it's supported on the Pi, it was setup so you clicked the platform, and it gave you a list of the emulators for that platform, then it would actually be a usable list.

BAZLOCO

@edale

If you click on a system, the current list provided a list of emulators, maybe I misread your post?

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Super-Nintendo-Entertainment-System

dankcushions

@edale said in Newbie question - What can be emulated one what?:

@BAZLOCO The problem with that list (and I actually view it as a MAJOR problem) is that it lists every system retropie can emulate on every platform.

It does NOT give you a list of what emulators are actually on which platform, which is especially bad given it's primary userbase is using the most limited of the supported systems (Raspberry Pi).

Now if rather than having to click on each of the 50ish systems to see if it's supported on the Pi, it was setup so you clicked the platform, and it gave you a list of the emulators for that platform, then it would actually be a usable list.

well there are a number of platforms on retropie: pi 0, 1, 2, 3. odroid (various), pc (infinite combos of spec), so such a list quickly becomes complex and full of special cases. additionally, a system like 'mame' has many possible emulators, but only a subset of these are playable for a pi 0, for example. others need a pi2/3, others need a pc. it's difficult to summarise that in a table.

generally, each system will have something written about compatibility across the pi models within their individual wiki pages, if there is anything to be said.

remember, the wiki is user-editable. if it has a problem, perhaps you could be the one to fix it? :)

edale

@dankcushions
It actually wouldn't be that hard to do with a database program like microsoft access, each emulator/system simply a y/n option for compatibility with each platform. Then you just need an output to display all the emulators/systems marked 'y' for whatever platform you want to use.

I don't actually have Microsoft office atm, and haven't ever played around with OpenOffice's database program (I think I've seen similar stuff done with GoogleDocs, but don't have clue 1 about using that), so I'm not sure if I could actually build such a database in a reasonable amount of time.

And that's not even counting the simple fact that I don't have nearly enough knowledge on the topic atm to even consider a wiki edit... I don't even know all the different platforms RetroPie supports atm...

The best I could probably manage atm would be a compatibility chart with a LOT of question marks for other users to fill in...

Seriously Wiki edits should be done by people that know what they're doing, not people new enough to the community to have not even seen RetroPie running yet...

I will say the only platforms I myself am actually interested in are Pi 0 and Pi 3b.

obsidianspider

Everyone has different levels of what they consider playable or acceptable. My suggestion is to wait for your Pis to arrive, try them out, play some games on them, tinker around a bit, and have fun.

edale

I've been playing around on my Pi3 to figure out what works and such, and have quickly discovered my 32 GB MicroSD card isn't nearly large enough.

I'm probably going to get 128 GB MicroSD cards for my Pi 3's (though if I see a good enough deal on a 256 GB card...), but I'm trying to figure out how much space I'll need for my Pi 0, and I have one question (because I don't have a second microSD to use for the Zero to test things out atm).

I know that the Pi 0 will probably be more limited with the SNES games, because the SNES apparently needs a 3GHz processor to perfectly emulate, but are there any similar limitations for the GBA?

I know in actual technical capabilities the GBA is better than the SNES, but it is also much newer, so not sure if the same kind of hardware emulation issues would hinder GBA emulation.