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Comment by Thaxll | Hacker News Reader

Rasberry Pi are slow as hell and don't emulate recent consoles.

"Why Perfect Hardware SNES Emulation Requires a 3GHz CPU" http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2712-why-perfect-hardware-...

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That's "accurately timed emulation", it's still emulation, not simulation. Do you know the difference?

You can buy the latest greatest 18 core Xeon and some SLI GTX 1080s and still not be able to emulate PS3... even if it's fast enough there's no emulator that works. Does that mean there's no point in owning a computer at all since it can't even emulate PS3, a gasp last-gen console! It's not even current!

That's sort of like saying a car that can't tow the space shuttle is worthless. What a pointless thing to say. The pi also can't play The Witcher 3 in 4K VR. So? We still want to play Mario and Sonic and a million arcade games and TurboGrafx roms and dosbox.

Case in point: I run PCSX2 on my computer running a third gen Intel CPU with a GTX 950 and have to resort to quite a few hacks just to get the game to run at a "measly" 45 fps or so. What's "great" is that the game is designed to run at 60 fps. The timers in the game are all based on a second being 60 frames. So, despite having a good enough frame rate, the game runs at anywhere from 2/3 to 3/4 of the original speed I remember it being.

From early on in the article:

"The casual gamer who only plays the most popular twenty or so titles will see no visible differences between an emulator requiring 300MHz and another requiring 3GHz, so they will of course go with the former. Although I do respect and appreciate speed-oriented emulators, one concerned with accuracy can't help but lament the way this approach stalls progress."

I'd say that about sums the situation up. For the vast majority of people who just want to revisit some classics, low-fi emulation plus workarounds - the kind of emulation you'll get on an rpi - is just dandy. For purists, though, that might might not be good enough.

Meh. You do you, and I'll do me.

I'd argue purist gamers aren't emulating at all. The super accurate emulators really target a very small audience. If you're really into old games, then nothing can replace the actual hardware. And nowadays you can easily use an SD based flash cart to get the main plus of emulation: download any game you want off the internet.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

Sure, you won't get 100% game coverage, but you'll be able to play most games.

> Rasberry Pi are slow as hell and don't emulate recent consoles.

Yes, but there's a bunch of old titles which are still worth playing. The video games scene did not wait until the 2000s to be interesting.

They do a real good job on anything in the 16-bit generation (SNES, Genesis), and handhelds up to the DS, at least in my experience.

I'm not playing anything twitchier than ChronoTrigger, though. I use my Pi to play RPGs, primarily, although I've haven't seen any problems playing Genesis fighting games like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter.

Pi 3 can play most N64 titles, definitely the famous well emulated ones, and some PSX and Dreamcast as well. The perf jump from Pi 1 to Pi 2 to Pi 3 was large!

That pretty much covers most retro games I'd be interested in, tbh. For me, what needs improvement is controller detection and (re)configuration.

Use Lakka instead of Retropie. 360 and PS3 controllers work great (plugged in—Bluetooth remains, as in most applications other than actual game consoles, a flaky PITA from what I've seen). I find the 360's dpad and face buttons unacceptable for retro games, but some people are OK with it. PS3 controller's pretty good. You shouldn't ever have a reason to mess with the mappings for either of those under Lakka unless you disagree with the defaults (unlikely, except maybe in MAME or something). Bonus for the PS3 controller is that the Playstation button works to kick you back to Lakka's menu, while IIRC the 360's system button doesn't (not accessible as an ordinary input), so it saves you having to use a button combo for that.

Lakka boots into Retroarch, which provides a unified I/O API to the "cores" (emulators) compiled against it. Even if you do manually map, you should only have to do it once.

I bought 4 madcatz fight pads a few years ago for the purpose of retro gaming (360 usb interface), single dpad with 2x3 buttons on top, and two shoulder buttons... great layout for retro gaming. Since genesis and snes layout is a subset in both cases. I tried a couple of the retropad (sega saturn layout), but they were really cheaply built and didn't work or last long.

Spent a few hours last night playing with retroarch on windows, though will have to change to config per core, so that the layout is correct in the different cores.

Most emulation is based on approximation, and while getting super accurate emulation is important from a preservationist standpoint, the reality of the situation is that these less accurate emulators work fine for the purpose of playing old games for entertainment

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