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Comment by fuqted | Hacker News Reader

I had the chance to buy one yesterday morning and I didn't take it up. That was my first hearing about it and I gotta say, beyond resell value I don't see the appeal of this thing.

You can make a smaller NES with a Pi Zero and rented time on a 3D printer. I don't think people would have a problem trading use of cartridges for a much larger, cross platform selection.

Is this a business opportunity?

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Found the guy that has never tried emulation on a Pi.

Can you elaborate? Ive never used an emulator. I'm thinking NES games have a very low need for cpu / mem resources. Do they not run as good as the original?

They had a bunch of special purpose chips that make emulation hard---both computationally intensive, and finnicky around details. For example, a real NES will glitch differently when many sprites are on the same row. Some games depend on this to be playable!

There are sound output bugs that make using any emulator terrible. The Pi 3 can barely handle SNES games.

I've tried an emulation box with RetroPie and the controller drivers are hard to find (at least for xbox 360 wired controller), the controls are difficult to set up (requiring manual edits to config files, which you need to plug a keyboard into your rpi to do), the controls are glitchy after you set them up, and the interface is not intuitive at all. If someone has a better idea for pi emulation I would really like to try it.

Use Lakka, not RetroPie. Use a PS3 controller—360 would work, but its dpad is terrible, and both work with no extra effort. PS3 even works over bluetooth with little to no fiddling. Only trick is you have to find the "right" roms (those blessed by various projects that record hashes of accurate rom dumps) or Lakka/Retroarch's auto-rom-scanning won't work, though you can still select roms manually. Small price to pay for the level of "just works" that Lakka provides.

[EDIT] links:

http://www.lakka.tv

Which romsets to use for various systems:

http://libretro.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6661

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