Remote Casting of RetroPi for good N64 playability

[adampalmer]

Hey guys. I've been using retropie for a while. SNES games work flawlessly, but N64 often lags badly, and pushes the Pi to the limits, even with optimization and overclocking.

Can I use the Pi to handle HDMI output to my TV and USB input from my controllers only, whilst offloading all the hard work to another networked Linux system? I'm not too worried about network latency as everything's connected via CAT6 cable.

I'd plan to install retropie on a VM, use usbip to connect the remote Pi's USB controllers to the retropie VM. Now, what's the best way to cast the screen? Does retropie use X? Could I just set the VM to push to a remote X server, which I'd set up on the raspberry?

[mitu]

@adampalmer Why would you do that ? RetroPie can be installed on a PC running Linux - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Debian/ - so you don't have to install RetroPie in a VM.

[adampalmer]

mitu: Good point, but a) I don't have a spare PC b) I don't have the space in the lounge to run a headless PC nicely near to the TV.

Do you know of a good embedded device with HDMI that's say 4x more powerful than a Pi and well supported for RetroPie?

[mitu]

@adampalmer My suggestion was that you don't have to install RP in a VM on the networked Linux system, I realised that it seemed to recommend to replace the whole PI with a PC - which in itself would not be such a bad idea. Unfortunately most of these systems, while small enough to compare to a RPI, are not in the same price range (Intel NUC or Gigabyte BRIX).
Going back to the original question, I guess you'd need to run an Login DM on the remote system and enable XDMCP and then run X -query <remote_ip> on the Pi, which will present you the login screen of the remote X server and you'll be able to run X11 apps directly from there (see more details at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/XDMCP).