I'm missing a hardware discussion
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The awesome thing about Raspberry PI is that if someone somewhere got it working it probably works for you as well if you are on the same PI#.
However, PI is still a little underpowered to run Dreamcast, GameCube gen consoles.
Now I see Retropie for x86 popping up. Very exciting.
However, I think Retropie should continue to be a plug n play-product. And hardware can differ a lot on x86.
Therefore I'm missing a hardware forum thread where the discussion is emulation from a hardware perspective. The goal would be to discuss emulation compability based on hardware configuration.
Best of all would be if Retropie would present official hardware configuration "best practices". So if I want to run GameCube plug n play just like on RPI3 which silent NUC, which memory, which GPU and so on.
Are we missing a discussion from a hardware perspective?
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@Arcuza
My 'Try Retropie on a PC!' thread contains some discussion of hardware other than the Pi, specifically x86 hardware.
I'd add N64 to the list of emulators that the Pi currently can't run satisfactory, although there has been some headway into this of late.
Unfortunately, the videos which show the Pi running N64 games reasonably well don't have the sound playing, and the guy who made them skips the intros a lot, so it's difficult to get a fair idea of performance.I am running Retropie on an old PC, and I think it's fantastic.
I'd love to see a thread, or even a whole forum section on other hardware options.
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@jamesbeat Would you like to compile a x86 alternative to RPI3? I would be great if there would be a recommended kit list if you'll like to go as high as 60 FPS on Dolphin and PCSX2.
Like Intel NUC m5 + 16 GB DDR3 + bla bla...
At least a discussion around it. My personal opinion would be to have it absolutely quiet fanless.
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I wouldn't know what to recommend for that, all I can really offer is one data point based on my own setup.
It's quite a modest PC:
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.0 Ghz
4gb ram
GeForce 8400 graphics card (I only really upgraded the graphics card because I wanted HDMI out)This setup runs N64 at a constant 60FPS - I can't get it to dip below that even with pretty high graphics settings and playing difficult to emulate games such as Goldeneye and Perfect Dark.
I get the feeling that I am not even close to the limits of the system running N64 games.The machine is an HP DC5800 small form factor PC, so it's not very big as PC's go.
Being a small form factor machine, it only has one fan which is located in the psu - there's no separate CPU fan.
The graphics card also has a small fan.
Despite not being fanless, for all practical purposes it is silent - I can't hear the fans even up close, let alone when it's a few feet away on my TV stand. -
@Arcuza said in I'm missing a hardware discussion:
Now I see Retropie for x86 popping up. Very exciting.
However, I think Retropie should continue to be a plug n play-product. And hardware can differ a lot on x86.The RetroPie project provides pre-installed Raspberry Pi images for user convenience. This probably will not change.
One can also do a binary install on a regular Raspbian image as well. This is just what the script does when it builds the image files.
The software is open source, so can be compiled on any Linux system with the right development libraries. Compiling RetroPie on x86 systems is not anything new, it's been on the wiki for at least a couple of Ubuntu releases. You can also compile on other ARM-based systems like ODroid.
It is unlikely the RetroPie project will supply binaries or pre-installed images for x86 hardware or any other non-Pi hardware, it's too much to maintain and is not within the scope of the project. Users who want to stray from the Raspberry Pi are welcome to compile from source.
If people wish to use a pre-made x86 image of emulators, Lakka provides this.
Best of all would be if Retropie would present official hardware configuration "best practices". So if I want to run GameCube plug n play just like on RPI3 which silent NUC, which memory, which GPU and so on.
If you wish to purchase and store a wide variety of non-Pi hardware including single-board-computers and Intel/AMD CPUs and AMD/nVidia video cards and do the time-consuming work of testing every emulator for every platform with every game for that platform and measuring their performance based on some criteria you find useful to find a "minimum recommended hardware", you are very welcome to maintain such a wiki page.
If you wish to work with other users and their experiences to curate such recommendations then please feel free to do that as well.
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re: binaries. libretro actually have their own nightly binaries for common architectures (including Linux x86 - see http://buildbot.libretro.com/nightly/linux/)
so it's possible the script could utilise these for x86, if anyone wants to code it...
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