eeepi

mitu

@Drakaen391 Why don't you start with a simple Debian install ? Raspbian is Debian based, so there's not much difference, plus you can get Debian Stretch right away and do a minimal install.

Drakaen391

@mitu tried , but had problems with trying to get a minimal install for deb 9.

Drakaen391

standard deb wont run on it either (not sure the manager, but it bogs down heavy, where as Raspbian i386 runs just fine

Drakaen391

@mitu Seems I found the issue with my minimal deb (bad USB stick) so going to go that route as I hit a lot of errors when I tried to upgrade jessie to stretch on the PC.

Drakaen391

@mitu apparently Debian defaults to gnome, which made for a headache as it had no autologin abilities, so now a new rebuild. and it wasn't allowing emulationstation to run with an error of it missing display.

going to run it again with xcfe or a similar lowend GDM

Sakitoshi

I did just this some days ago to 2 mini notebooks I have. A Dell Inspiron 11z 1110 and an HP Pavilion dm1-3260LA.

I installed Debian 9.9 with xfce, both were fairly easy to set up (I have enough experience with linux), the dell cpu (pentium su4100) should be capable of handling things well enough but the performance ends up being pretty shit only because of the pathetic intel gm45 it has. to be fair it runs smooth once you are in a game but emulationstation is jerky and you can't apply even the most basic shader, I didn't even bothered trying ps1 games.
The hp on the other hand has a slightly less capable cpu (amd e-350) but the integrated amd radeon hd 6310 really makes a difference, it can run all the retro systems upto low end ps1 without a hitch, shaders included. I remark low end because 3d ps1 games don't run at 100% speed but nearing 90% or even a little less. I suspect the weaker cpu shows here.

The good news is that since we are on an x86 cpu we can run old windows games without effort and I threw all the touhou games (yes, all 16 of them, pc98 included and some .5's too, even the 17th trial) and jazz jackrabbit 2 and all run flawless (or as flawless as wine allows them to run). I still don't try pc dos games but it should be a given.

Drakaen391

looking like this could be in the Failed project bin.

Not sure why, but EmulationStation and the laptop are not talking to each other and my resolution is going on the fritz.

edmaul69

@Sakitoshi if emulationstation is jerky, in the start menu in ui settings turn off help system menu.

danielmewhouse

Hi!!! If you wanna make a simple RetroPie machine out of eeePC, why not Xubuntu + RetroPie script? Xubuntu is lightweight, easy to maintain and the result will be almost the same as using a Raspberry Pi. I've done this someone ago with an old laptop and was a great machine, but the motherboard died because was so old...

Drakaen391

ill try that, maybe it wont fritz out and go into a weird HD resolution on the old screen