Newbie - Setting up Arcade Machine, Question about hardware requirements

Tango

I've done a lot of work on Linux in the past. I used to run a business where my servers ran on Debian, but that was back in 2008 or before, so it's been a while. I also have no experience with Raspberry Pi or Raspbian. Now I'm on a Mac (which, at least, has very similar command line functions and commands). I'm also looking at putting an arcade machine in our new recreation room. I'm likely going to get this cabinet. It does not include a computer. I've talked to a few people in that company and one has used RetroPie for his arcade machine based on one of their cabinets.

They have videos about installing RetroPie and connecting a Raspberry Pi and claim that they're incredibly easy to set up. Before watching those, I came to this site to read about the root of the situation - RetroPie. One of the first things I've found is the list of the emulators that can work on RetroPie on this page. At the top of the page is, "Note: systems may have varying degrees of availability and performance depending on the platform RetroPie is running."

Is there a quick and easy reference about what is needed for the various systems? Or is there a minimum Pi configuration that will work for everything there?

I'm mainly interested in MAME, Apple II, Color Computer, Amiga, and the Atari systems, but it would be nice to be able to add other gaming systems, too.

(I've been on a serious overwork marathon since about 2000 and this year things are finally settling so my New Year's Resolution is actually to learn about what's out there for gaming and to spend more time playing games and enjoying myself. So if I can add more games to this system, it's worth getting something that can support them all.)

caver01

@Tango
To support EVERYTHING would require a fast PC. But the Pi offers tremendous value and I think you would be pretty happy with your list and the ability to expand. Consider a handful of Nintendo64 games as sorta the upper limit of capability for a pi-based system, so looking backward from that point in time you really do have a ton of emulators to explore. There are even multiple arcade emulators including several versions of MAME, each of which have strengths or certain games that work best on them. Many of us run several versions of MAME on one system to get the best playability across a broad list of titles.

As always, there is no “best” solution, as each of us has a different idea for what we want our systems to do. Each build will have constraints on controller hardware, video orientation, cabinet size constraints etc.

dankcushions

@Tango said in Newbie - Setting up Arcade Machine, Question about hardware requirements:

Is there a quick and easy reference about what is needed for the various systems? Or is there a minimum Pi configuration that will work for everything there?

no, as it's not an easy question to answer. ie, you can run "MAME" on anything, but which MAME? or n64 - you can run that on a pi1, but you wouldn't want to, but if we get into "100% accuracy", then you're looking at a top end PC, and even that isn't 100% accurate.

note that whilst retropie supports a number of systems, only the raspberry pi systems offer a pre-installed SD-card image where all you need to do is configure a controller and add roms. i would recommend a pi3 for instant results, and a pi4 if you don't mind waiting for the official release (no ETA).

Clyde

The most essential things already being said by @caver01 and @dankcushions, I just want to add some details regarding MAME you might not find immediately as a new Retropie user:

The standard emulator for MAME in a fresh Retropie installation is lr-mame2003 – lr stands for LibRetro, a multi-emulator framework that's used prominently by Retropie, but not exclusively. This so-called LibRetro "core" is based on MAME 0.78 from – surprise! – 2003. It will run most arcade titles from the 70's to the early 2000's nicely on a Pi 3.

Some praiseworthy enthusiasts have upgraded it with new features and more supported games from later MAME versions. This upgraded fork is called mame2003-plus and can be installed manually via Retropie's package management. See here for its documentation and here for a list of newly or somehow better supported games. Like others, I switched to mame2003-plus as my main arcade emulator and didn't miss the original mame2003 since then. Mind that you'll need a plus-compatible romset, but my first link has instructions on how to build one from other versions.

There also is a forum thread about lr-mame2003-plus.

Another alternative is Final Burn Neo (FB Neo in short), which is not a MAME fork, but an arcade emulator in its own regard, and whose emphasis is speed and playability over the exact hardware emulation that MAME is focused on. You might want to look at this LR core, too.

FB Neo has a forum thread here, too.

edit: And before I get lynched for not mentioning AdvanceMAME, another very famous MAME variant, I'll happily do so. 😇 But alas, I cannot say much about it beyond that, since I never used it apart from some tests. It's said to have many advantages, while its main downside is not being available as a LR core, and thus, not being part of Retropie's auto-configuration features.

As for the hardware, I second @dankcushions in either buying a Pi 3b+ now, or wait for full Pi 4 support of Retropie, with a slight tendency to recommend the latter, since the Pi 4 is significantly faster than the Pi 3 for nearly the same price. That said, there are so many ways to use a decommissioned Pi that's not really an issue.

@Tango said in Newbie - Setting up Arcade Machine, Question about hardware requirements:

my New Year's Resolution is actually to learn about what's out there for gaming and to spend more time playing games and enjoying myself.

Hear, hear! 🍻

Tango

What I'm getting from this is that I'd need a higher end computer sitting in the arcade cabinet to handle all the system emulators. Is there any kind of summary showing which emulators require higher end hardware? In other words, other than trial and error, is there an easy way to find out which emulators need more memory or speed?

Am I right that the more complex an original system is, the more power and memory is needed to emulate it? For instance, emulating an Amiga would take notably more resources than your typical MAME setup. Would that be about right?

It sounds like if I want to run MAME, that a 3B Pi will do the job, but that I shouldn't count on that for everything. I do see the discussion about different versions of MAME, so I'll likely start with @Clyde's suggestion about using MAME 2003+. Once I get that working, I'll probably start working with other versions as well. The main thing is to get it up and running and to keep at least one version functioning so my friends and I can have some fun.

Once I have a working version, I might consider buying a more powerful computer and doing a RetroPie install on that to see what systems I can emulate.

Darksavior

@Tango Arcade emulation requires a lot of power. With a pi3b+ you'll have to juggle between emulators and be limited to at least 2 or 3 of them. With a pi4 you can use finalburn-neo as your primary arcade emulator. It will have better emulation accuracy in most games. The ones that don't, I use mame2003plus. 90's midway games like mk, smashtv and rampage world tour, run better on 2003. You might be able to get away with using a newer version of mame like 2010, 2015, or 2016 but I haven't done extensive performance testing on those. Overall, you probably won't be able to run 3d arcade games.

There's no official release for the pi4 but the dev builds are usable.

Tango

Let's say I go for more power. Compared to stock Debian (which, admittedly, I haven't used since about 2008), how hard is it to install RetroPie and setup a version of MAME or FinalBurn on it? And, knowing that this is a complex situation, can someone give me a ballpark on what I'd need to handle MAME or FinalBurn as well as emulators for Apple II, Amiga, Nintendo, and the various Atari systems?

I'm just trying to get an idea of how much I'd be spending to jump up to that level.

dankcushions

@Tango said in Newbie - Setting up Arcade Machine, Question about hardware requirements:

Let's say I go for more power. Compared to stock Debian (which, admittedly, I haven't used since about 2008), how hard is it to install RetroPie and setup a version of MAME or FinalBurn on it?

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Debian/

And, knowing that this is a complex situation, can someone give me a ballpark on what I'd need to handle MAME or FinalBurn as well as emulators for Apple II, Amiga, Nintendo, and the various Atari systems?

define “MAME” - what is the most sophisticated game you want to emulate? MAME more or less supports every game (console and all) at this point, so the requirements can vary hugely.

define “Nintendo” - specifically which Nintendo systems? NES can be done with a pi 1, but wii/3DS/switch is more demanding.

Clyde

@Tango said in Newbie - Setting up Arcade Machine, Question about hardware requirements:

Let's say I go for more power. Compared to stock Debian (which, admittedly, I haven't used since about 2008), how hard is it to install RetroPie and setup a version of MAME or FinalBurn on it?

I would say pretty easily, especially if you're already a little familiar with Linux. Even if was a long time ago, the basics didn't change much (I'm using Linux since 2006/2007 myself). Apart from the Pi 3b (no plus) in my upright cabinet, I'm running Retropie on my PC and Laptop with Kubuntu 18.04 and KDE Neon. The only not(ic)able difference is that I have to enter the sudo password on those systems to start RP's setup scripts, whereas the stock Retropie image for the Pi doesn't require that (which is a security issue of course, but depending on your setup more or less negligible).

Retropie installs into /opt, so it doesn't collide with the main system … well, mostly, because it upgrades some packages liks SDL to versions that might break some dependencies, but I can just downgrade them to system state without noticing any problems in Retropie. That said, I'm using a separate user "pi" for Retropie to keep it apart from my everyday user and its $HOME directory.

One day-to-day tip I want to give you is to switch from RP's standard Samba shares to FISH or sshfs over ssh. You could even combine the latter with autofs to mount it automatically on-demand and unmount it again after some idle time. Although encrypted, the file and directory access is much faster than Samba on my systems, and with public key authentication also more secure. See the Docs about how to setup ssh on Retropie. Just remember to de-share or even uninstall Samba after setting up ssh file access to close that then unnecessary rabbit hole. You'll close standard Windows access to RP this way, of course – if that's an issue for you.

edit: Added link for ssh pubkey authentication.

Tango

Asking for clarification of a point I see in this thread and other places: It's mentioned that there is no stable version for the Pi 4. Is that no stable RetroPie or no stable of one or more of the emulators? (Since people consider the dev version stable, I can always use that.)

dankcushions

@Tango said in Newbie - Setting up Arcade Machine, Question about hardware requirements:

Asking for clarification of a point I see in this thread and other places: It's mentioned that there is no stable version for the Pi 4. Is that no stable RetroPie or no stable of one or more of the emulators? (Since people consider the dev version stable, I can always use that.)

we can't speak for the emulators as they're typically not maintained by us (though we sometimes mitigate against unstable third-party software by using a specific version/branch), but the dev version of retropie on the pi4 is certainly not 'stable'. when it has reached a threshold of stability/confidence it will be release officially.

tackett1980

Honestly there is enough information out there about installing retropie or some other front end on a PC that the process is pretty easy and spelled out even for someone as tech stupid as me. Given the price vs performance of relatively old and cheap PCs vs a new pi or even a pi4 for that matter, if I had it to do over again I would just go the PC route especially after figuring out that what some people define as “acceptable” performance for emulators like dream cast and N64 is an entire galaxy removed from what I would consider even playable.

So really it all comes down to your specific needs.

If your trying to emulate simple games >25-30 years old then a pi3 or 3b+ should be able to do it and honestly there are even exceptions to that depending on the game.

If it’s after the last two decades just go PC.

But really, sit down and make a list of about 10-20 games that you basically can’t live without, research the hardware needs for them and go with the strongest one.