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Comment by radiorental | Hacker News Reader

You're paying $200 for a nice case and the 30 minutes you saved putting Kodi & Retro Pi on a $35 computer.

And an AMD CPU with Radeon graphics. Little more oomph than a Pi3, presumably access to more X86 software and access to the fruits of the labor of the mature dev community around full OpenGL, instead of OpenGL ES2 on the Pi.

RetroPie's fun, and a great piece of software. Something faster than a Pi3 would open up more systems for reliable emulation, and access to x86 software simplifies a lot of things.

Maybe a bit off topic but, how is Kodi on a Pi at decoding high quality MKVs with DTS sound? I have a Retro Pi on a Raspberry Pi 3b, but haven't bothered putting Kodi on it as I have a Zotac Z-Box right next to it with optical outputs and all that jazz. Might be nice to consolidate.

Not sure about DTS (I think passthrough works, at least, if you have a receiver, and I'm pretty sure it'll at least give you stereo from it if you don't) but an RPi2 will do h.264 1080p video no problem. Any Pi, however, will fail to play the newer h.265/hevc codec at anything above maybe SD resolutions, as they lack hardware support for that codec and don't have anywhere near the horsepower to give you anything but an audio-desynced slideshow in software.

Depends on the video codec that the MKV contains. H.264 is handled with hardware decoding. H.265 apparently works in some limited cases, but I wouldn't count on it. VC-1 (WMV9) is supported for hardware decoding, after purchase of a separate license.

The audio is all software-decoded, but I think it can be configured for passthrough directly to HDMI, for at least some formats.

If your Zotac is running everything, then there's no real reason to use a Pi3. DTS passthrough works great though.

You'll still need to house the Pi in a case, get a controller (assuming they'll come with the console) configure Retro Pi and Kodi.

I'd say it's well over two hours over at least a $70 computer (including shipping and handling).

You are not required to have the Pi in a case. It's nice to do though. Fake USB SNES conrollers that work great on RetroPie are about $3 each if you search around.

In that price range I have only been able to find terrible controllers.

Where did you get yours, and how did you asses quality before purchase?

AliExpress. I just read a whole bunch of reviews. Not going to do super much effort for $3 :)

I bought two of these: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Super-Wired-Game-Controller-...

Both my crappy SNES controllers still work to this day. I only put a usb extension cable between Pi and controller so i can play Mappy on my couch :)

Why do I want a wire from me to the TV on the other side of the room? I get that it's authentically retro, but...

You want retro bluetooth controllers then :) They're about $25 indeed.

The Atari console comes in a pretty case. I was going for a comparable device, not something that runs similar software.

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