Raspberry Pi 3 is Cool & Good

[Punch]

So my Raspberry Pi B+ just arrived. I bought this with the intention of building a mini arcade machine.

I saw a lot of arcade pi cabinet projects on the internet, so I thought it would run a decent portion of arcade games well... I should have done a more thorough research because the first thing I did was to load Outrun on RetroPie's MAME and it quickly became apparent that this wouldn't be appropriate for gaming. Hell even the NES emu was slow before I overclocked the device. I'm not a linux guy, so I wonder what can I do on this ARM minicomputer.

Anyone with advice on running arcade games on the Pi B+? I've heard that the PI 2 is loads better and even runs PSX/N64 well but I wasn't aware of that model when I bought mine.

[Dicer]

You just missed the new rev, which is a shame, but the original model should handle everything 16-bit era just fine and dandy. Overclocking the thing is fine which boosts it a bit, but yeah it's $35 or whatever so they aren't exactly speed demons. It's a fun lil kit to tinker with and even makes a cool lil media box, just don't expect blazing performance from it. I have one with Retro pi on it, but I need to recompile and get a good controller solution.

[technozombie]

I have been looking at putting a pi 2 inside a snes as a project for me and my daughter. There is a gpio board you can buy that allows you to connect nes or snes controller ports to the pi. The pi 2 is currently hard to get.

[geise]

Don't know why you'd want to run MAME on a Rasberry Pi.  My instant thought would be "that's going to be slow as balls".  What version of MAME is it?  You running MAME 0.37b5 version in MAME4ALL?   That is the only version that will give you decent speeds on a Pi. 

You would be better off running Final Burn Alpha for it. https://code.google.com/p/pifba/

[ccovell]

ARM-based devices are cheap, and they're everywhere nowadays but still can't pump out the power for full-framerate emulation*...  People don't realize this until after they've bought the thing.


*unless you write optimized C code from scratch, or use the more suitable assembly.

[KingDrool]

I just bought a Pi2 for my son and it shipped last night. Should be here in the next few days. I'm pretty excited to tinker around with it.

[geise]

ARM-based devices are cheap, and they're everywhere nowadays but still can't pump out the power for full-framerate emulation*...  People don't realize this until after they've bought the thing.


*unless you write optimized C code from scratch, or use the more suitable assembly.

So true and is why I got an Nvida Shield for portable emulation.  That thing runs emulators like a champ.  Install Retroarch and that's about all you need...and Uae4all2 for Android.  Hehe nothing like Amiga Workbench on the go.

[toymachine78]

Anybody have any updates on this? I've been thinking about picking one of these up to play most of the genesis and SNES titles I don't have the cash to buy.

Reading online it sounds like these are great for emulation using retropie. I was surprised to see punches comment above.

[Duo_R]

Yeah all the articles make it sound like its awesome. But I'm thinking its people that haven't played games since the days of arcades and lost their memory? Maybe never messed with emulation?

What's the killer emulation box, I hear the original Xbox is really outdated as a emulator box, is it down to PCs these days?

[Punch]

Well it's not really all that bad if you OC it. But you should be buying the Rapsberry Pi 2 anyway, which is miles better (it runs PSX as far as I know).

[Duo_R]

And this just guy out? I feel bad my friend just bought a Pi 1 at the beginning of summer for this. Lol

I'm glad I held off

[BigusSchmuck]

Yeah all the articles make it sound like its awesome. But I'm thinking its people that haven't played games since the days of arcades and lost their memory? Maybe never messed with emulation?

What's the killer emulation box, I hear the original Xbox is really outdated as a emulator box, is it down to PCs these days?

I always thought the Dreamcast did a decent job emulating stuff (other than snes go figure). PSP is even better yet. Dunno if this has changed a whole lot in the past 7 years, but I used to use my Dreamcast to be a emulator whore.

[toymachine78]

Well it's not really all that bad if you OC it. But you should be buying the Rapsberry Pi 2 anyway, which is miles better (it runs PSX as far as I know).

I've thought about buying one of these. Iooks pretty cool, and fairly cheap. I just wish there were some references

http://charlotte.craigslist.org/vgm/5161408592.html

[toymachine78]

Just read this on techradar regarding emulation on the Pi 2. Sounds like the nes,SNES, and genesis work great, which is what I want it for. I may take a chance

Up to speed?

How good is the actual emulation? For the most part it's great. Sega Mega Drive/Gensis games run at full speed, as did all the SNES games we tried. There were some visual glitches in Super FX games like Star Fox/Wing and Stunt Race FX, but that's more down to the state of the emulator rather than anything specific to the Raspberry Pi 2 or Emulation Station.

In fact, Emulation Station actually includes multiple emulators for the trickier systems. There are three SNES emulators, two MAME emulators and two N64 emulators on hand to experiment with.



The only consistent slowdown we saw was with N64 games. Many run very well, including Mario Kart 64, but fan favourite Goldeneye 007's frame rate was inconsistent, taking a real dip in more open areas. It's playable with patience, but only just.

There are some games that flat-out didn't run though, sadly including the much-loved The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Some retro gaming tinkerers have had better luck than us, however, with videos of it working on Raspberry Pi 2 already available on YouTube.

A lot of retro games look pretty great too. Emulation Station doesn't go overboard with fancy filters to smooth out older games, but you can choose the output resolution for each system, letting you pick between a more pixelated or blurry look.

N64 is a case of various hits and misses, but every other system we tried works very well on Raspberry Pi. It really does make a great base as a retro gaming system. PSX emulation is particularly impressive, seeming virtually perfect with the handful of titles we tried.

[ClodBuster]

I guess the N64 is just a bitch emulation-wise. Might be due to the exotic hardware architecture, or due to the fact that Rareware needed to squeeze every inch if power out of it for good graphics and I'm sure their game engines also heavily depended on constantly streaming data from the cartridge, where only a modern solid state drive could keep up the pace.
Similar things can be said about the emulation of Ocarina of Tike and Majora's Mask when playing them on the GameCube with the Zelda Collector's edition disc. The emulation is alright for the most time, but the BGM distorts often if the game pauses or loads a new area.