New to Raspberry and RetroPie - Which Pi (3, 4 or 5) ?

jjjlll

Hi,
I'm planning to join the fun world of retro gaming with a Pi and going to buy a first Raspberry Pi starter kit. I read on many posts that Pi 5 was not yet officially supported, but mainly work, and Pi4b is working well, even without 8Gb of RAM but the 3 looks even having more compatibility (https://retropie.org.uk/stats/pkgflags/).
So I'm not sure if I should buy a Pi3, that is getting old, a Pi4 or a 5 ?
If Pi5, does it going to be stable enough ?
What would you recommend for a newbie, with some computer knowledge, to purchase as a good starter kit ? new Pi5 with 8b ? a Pi4b with 8Gb or even 4Gb? a Pi 3?
Or should I even go with a Pandora Box ?
Goal is to play old console games up to PS1, or potentially PS2, and mostly old arcade games.
Thanks for your recommendation.

mitu

Is Playstation 1 is the upper limit, hardware wise even a Raspberry Pi 3B+ is enough. PS2 is a lot more demanding and even a Pi5 is not enough to make it full speed.
RAM is not as important as far as emulation goes, so you don't need 8Gb - 2Gb is more than enough even with a Pi4.

barbudreadmon

I don't think it's worth buying a pi4/2GB when pi5/2GB are available and affordable.
Furthermore, "old arcade games" is a very vague concept, and some of them might be very demanding, so a pi5 would definitely help with that.

Lolonois

On the information given I would lean towards a Pi4.

You have a ready made environment, a lot of documentation and many users which are in the same boat as you. The PS1 emulation works very well. Also Arcade games up to mid of 1990s will be fine.
You can also squeeze out a little bit more power if needed with overclocking.

With a Pi5, albeit having more horsepower, be prepared to learn RetroPie from the trenches. As you can see it this platform is still in frequent discussion here and there is no readymade image yet.

I started with a Pi3 my first arcade setup (as there was nothing else around), but I would not start with it again (in short: too many limitations for my requirements). If at all I would consider a PiZero2 which plays roughly in the same performance league but has a more modern graphics stack.

scaramoosh

Tbh I'd get the 3 cause the normal HDMI is such an advantage and everything emulates on it fine from the 2D era. Also they're dirt cheap, the 4 and 5 aren't worth the money...

Tbh though I'd go for a Steam Deck, you can pick them up mega cheap now, they're all in one and emulation is so much better.

barbudreadmon

@scaramoosh said in New to Raspberry and RetroPie - Which Pi (3, 4 or 5) ?:

I'd get the 3 cause the normal HDMI is such an advantage and everything emulates on it fine from the 2D era

That's plain wrong, many 2D arcade systems won't run fine on a pi3, including popular systems like segas32, cv1k, ...
Furthermore the OP made it clear that he is interested in systems up to ps2...

I don't even understand the part about normal hdmi being an advantage.

matchaman

For RetroPie I would suggest Pi 4 4GB. It's officially supported and you don't need more than 4GB of RAM (2GB is enough if you don't use rewind).

Ashpool

I am not sure what to suggest, a Pi4 with 2GB would have been my answer in pre Pi5 times... and still, the Pi4 runs an official image, but the pi5 ain't such a newcomer nowadays and the official image is still based on (IIRC) buster and since then, even before the Pi5 was released, the discussions where about when there will be a "bullseye" image and whether it will be 64bit/32bit or still in support of 32bit ... sigh...

So the official image is missing debian 11, the 64 vs. and or 32 bit problematic still unsolved and now with the pi5 we are over the edge to 64bit and on bookworm as the current debian/raspi OS base...

I would say, it depends... if you want to play straight ahead and use the existing image, go for a pi4 with whatever mem you may need to reuse it after upgrading retropie to a newer device (for retropie on a RP4 2GB is IMHO more then enough, if you want to use it as a terraria or minecraft server afterwards, at least 4GB better 8 would be the way to go).

But if you are totally new to raspis and retropie... well, bad timing, if you simply can afford it, go for the above mentioned route of the pi4 and learn some *nix basics ... but be assured that all you learn for the nowadays official buster based image is void for the next official one, because too much on the underlying OS was changed (just to add a match of buzzword: config.txt vs. cmdline.txt) - if you are willing to experiment and learn on raspberry pi/*nix in general in the meantime, go for a pi5 with the memory you can afford!