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Comment by starik36 | Hacker News Reader

I've attempted to do this. It's not as simple as Jeff Atwood states.

For starters, there is a lot more tinkering and messing around than is indicated in the article. You want to connect an old PS3 controller that's sitting around? Great...prepare to spend 3-4 days messing around with config file via SSH to get it just right. And even then, it fails intermittently and works in some games, but not others.

Secondly, while some N64 games do emulate reasonably nicely, most do not. There are either audio issues, or video issues. And on and on. PSX and Dreamcast games - I couldn't get those to work without lag at all.

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Have you checked out RetroPie, the distribution mentioned in the article? In my experience, using a PS3 controller with that consisted of connecting the controller via a USB cable, selecting 'configure controller' from the main menu, and mapping all the buttons. All in all that took maybe a minute or two.

I've tried using RetroPie with the PS3 controller over bluetooth and it works.....50% of the time. The problem is that when it doesn't, there's literally nothing you can do, you have to log in through ssh and restart the Pi, and it's incredibly frustrating.

I did use RetroPie. That is true, PS3 controller is pretty easy to connect via the USB cable. I tried it to connect it wirelessly. That's where it gets tricky and unreliable.

Thanks to another comment in this article, I installed retroarch, and dug out one of my madcatz fight pad controllers (xbox 360 usb interface). The controller in question was one of the better options for something that would support sega genesis, and snes layouts... 2x3 on the top buttons, with left and right trigger.

Would love to see a UI front end that when you started it asked you to press any button on the controller 1... then start with only (dpad up, down, left, right, select, back) for the UI... then ask if there are more controllers... Once you import/scan your library, when you enter a new rom device type, it can then ask you to roll through the buttons with the original controller on screen, highlighting that button's original name/position.

From there, it would be far easier to play retro games (though arcade mapping would need to be per game).

Yes, it has gotten radically better in the last year or two, combination of Pi 3 hardware being quad core and much faster, and the RetroPie project iterating and improving rapidly.

Jeff, I've used a recent RetroPie (v3.3 afaik) and Pi2, which is only slightly slower that Pi3. I've also attempted to overclock it - it helped a bit, but not much.

pi3 is quite a bit faster:

Geekbench 2.4.2 results, Pi3 on left, Pi2 on right:

Overall 2086 / 1302 Integer 1641 / 998 Floating point 3353 / 2126 Memory 1204 / 729 Stream 978 / 631

Sunspider results, same arrangement:

2888 ms / 4705 ms

Not 2x faster, but pretty close! It's also quad core, though the above benchmarks, particularly sunspider, are absolutely single thread / core perf.

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