5 ms·

I've had an arcade cabinet with a 9-year old computer in it that finally failed the other day. I tried the Rasberry Pi route awhile ago, it does fine on the old

by windlep 10y ago

I've had an arcade cabinet with a 9-year old computer in it that finally failed the other day. I tried the Rasberry Pi route awhile ago, it does fine on the oldest 80's MAME games, but has issues with most of the 90's era games of which I'm still quite fond. And as others have noted, it's prolly going to suck for NES/SNES emulation. So when the arcade computer failed, I tried a different route. I realized my main desktop computer (a Core i7-4790k) is plenty powerful to do some arcade gaming on the side. A long VGA/USB/audio cable later, and my arcade is now running directly off a VM from my desktop. This works so much better than dealing with moving games on/off a SD card, and managing more physical things. It's easy to manage the VM, snapshot it, and change the config without even touching the arcade now. With VT-d, PCI-passthrough, and the ridiculous amount of CPU cores everything comes with that this should be a more normal thing in the future. It'd be lovely to use those new multi-Gbit wireless standards instead of a cable though...

throwawayy2 10y ago
> And as others have noted, it's prolly going to suck for NES/SNES emulation. It works great for NES/SNES emulation, and even N64 emulation with an appropriate video plugin.
- windlep 10y ago
  Ah, is that the latest model of the RasPi? It was lagging quite abit on my older Rasberry Pi B model.
  - PostOnce 10y ago
    What emulator are you using? They have different features and run at very different speeds. You can run zsnes totally fine on something that has no hope of running bsnes/higan. Try some others.
    - windlep 10y ago
      Yea, I've had too many issues with imprecise SNES emulation, so I only wanted to use bsnes. I get why people skimp and go for a less precise emu that can handle their hardware, but its too frustrating to me to invest time into a game to be thwarted by emulation failures.
      - rangibaby 10y ago
        What games? Maybe I was too young or simply didn't care, but every game I tried that ran at all (without immediately obvious bugs) in ZSNES were playable and fun with modest hardware even in the 1990s. Of course I would use BSNES now, or just a real SNES. But back then it was like magic.
        JonnieCache 10y ago
        Depends when you used ZSNES. There have been times in its history when it's been broken on some very popular games, eg. Yoshis Island, Chrono Trigger, DKC2. The really frustrating thing was that the bugs wouldn't show up until about halfway through the game, usually when some nonstandard transparency effect was applied. Right at the point when you'd really invested in the game, very annoying. The other common one was timing problems (ultimately, they're all timing bugs.) Starfox for example used to run something like 20% faster than on hardware. It looked fine, and if you grew up with the PAL version you might assume that the speed increase was just down to version differences, but the game was unplayable.
        Aeolos 10y ago
        > Starfox for example used to run something like 20% faster than on hardware/ Make that 200%. I own the original and it's indeed unplayable on zsnes. Zsnes is a horrible SNES emulator all around. It was decent when it came out 15 years ago, but it mis-emulates so many things it's just not worth bothering with it anymore. Square games (Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Rudra no Hihou) all have wrong sound effects; anything with SuperFX is totally broken; Tri-Star games crash and lock-up randomly (Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean). And the list goes on and on. It's sad, because zsnes really has the best UI of the lot, but in 2016 there is simply no reason to use it. Use either bsnes/higan (for 100% accurate emulation) or snes9x (if you want to run it on an underpowered tablet.)
    - GlitchMr 10y ago
      Pretty sure ZSNES is written in x86 assembly, so it wouldn't run all that well on Raspberry Pi, which is using ARM CPU considering that you would need to emulate an emulator.
      - colejohnson66 10y ago
        That's easy! Just use Bochs. Don't bother with recompilation, just use interpreted x86 :)
      - anonbanker 10y ago
        ZSNES hasn't been written in full asm since sometime after zsKnight died. Snes9x is written in C++, IIRC. As is MESS' snes emulator.
  - captn3m0 10y ago
    I use fceux on my raspi model b, and it works flawlessly.
  - frikk 10y ago
    Is yours the original Pi or Pi 2? The Pi 2 is like 6x more powerful than the Pi, and the Pi 3 is about that much more powerful than the Pi 2. I have the pi B and I can do SNES pretty decently with a little overclocking. I understand the Pi 2 can do SNES with ease, and N64 pretty well too. I can only imagine the Pi 3 will do N64 smoothly and more.
deverton 10y ago
Consider a Steam Link, http://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/ or similar system to mirror the content from your PC. It will handle sending video/audio to your TV/arcade and sending the inputs back the desktop.
- taneq 10y ago
  How much latency does one of these add? It might be fine on a modern cinematic console shooter, but a large amount of the appeal of some old arcade games is their frame-perfect timing. I can't imagine that's helped by adding a round trip over the network, not to mention streaming the video back. That's gotta add 2-3 frames' latency at the very least.
  - aallen90 10y ago
    The default settings have some noticeable latency (5-10ms), but changing the video encoding from "balanced" to "fast" drop it down to almost nothing. You can additionally plug the controller(s) into your PC to further remove any input delay. I can't vouch for emulated arcade games, but it works surprisingly well with a steam collection.
    - icelancer 10y ago
      Axiom Verge was unplayable on any settings I tried.
  - douche 10y ago
    You want to make sure that you have the Steam Link wired into your network, rather than on wireless, because that makes a huge difference. Otherwise, it's gotten so they are pretty decent now. When the Links first came out, they were quite laggy and unstable, but after a hundred or so patches, it's settled down.
- slantyyz 10y ago
  I'm modding my old iCade cabinet to make a bartop with an 8" LCD monitor, and I opted to use an Atom based stick PC. I'm going to use the stick PC for running retro emulation locally, and streaming from Steam via the Windows Steam client. I'm also going to use an HDMI switcher so that I can connect it to a faster machine like my laptop as an option.
ratzinho87 10y ago
I am playing with a RetroPie based gaming system on an rpi3 and all nes and snes games I tried worked without any problem. It even works for PS1,though I only tried one game so far. Dos games are hit or miss, and it does horribly for N64.
- Sander_Marechal 10y ago
  I used to have problems on my Pi2 with N64, but enabling overclocking fixed those issues for me :-)
- throwawayy2 10y ago
  > Dos games are hit or miss, and it does horribly for N64. Use an optimized video plugin, such as (shameless plug): https://github.com/tachiweasel/mupen64plus-video-videocore https://github.com/tachiweasel/mupen64plus-video-videocore
ElCapitanMarkla 10y ago
In regards to SNES / NES sucking. I tried the retropie about a year ago on my Pi2 and there were no issues at all. Sega Genesis/Megadrive worked well too.

by windlep 10y ago

throwawayy2 10y ago

> And as others have noted, it's prolly going to suck for NES/SNES emulation. It works great for NES/SNES emulation, and even N64 emulation with an appropriate video plugin.

windlep 10y ago
Ah, is that the latest model of the RasPi? It was lagging quite abit on my older Rasberry Pi B model.
- PostOnce 10y ago
  What emulator are you using? They have different features and run at very different speeds. You can run zsnes totally fine on something that has no hope of running bsnes/higan. Try some others.
  - windlep 10y ago
    Yea, I've had too many issues with imprecise SNES emulation, so I only wanted to use bsnes. I get why people skimp and go for a less precise emu that can handle their hardware, but its too frustrating to me to invest time into a game to be thwarted by emulation failures.
    - rangibaby 10y ago
      What games? Maybe I was too young or simply didn't care, but every game I tried that ran at all (without immediately obvious bugs) in ZSNES were playable and fun with modest hardware even in the 1990s. Of course I would use BSNES now, or just a real SNES. But back then it was like magic.
      - JonnieCache 10y ago
        Depends when you used ZSNES. There have been times in its history when it's been broken on some very popular games, eg. Yoshis Island, Chrono Trigger, DKC2. The really frustrating thing was that the bugs wouldn't show up until about halfway through the game, usually when some nonstandard transparency effect was applied. Right at the point when you'd really invested in the game, very annoying. The other common one was timing problems (ultimately, they're all timing bugs.) Starfox for example used to run something like 20% faster than on hardware. It looked fine, and if you grew up with the PAL version you might assume that the speed increase was just down to version differences, but the game was unplayable.
        Aeolos 10y ago
        > Starfox for example used to run something like 20% faster than on hardware/ Make that 200%. I own the original and it's indeed unplayable on zsnes. Zsnes is a horrible SNES emulator all around. It was decent when it came out 15 years ago, but it mis-emulates so many things it's just not worth bothering with it anymore. Square games (Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Rudra no Hihou) all have wrong sound effects; anything with SuperFX is totally broken; Tri-Star games crash and lock-up randomly (Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean). And the list goes on and on. It's sad, because zsnes really has the best UI of the lot, but in 2016 there is simply no reason to use it. Use either bsnes/higan (for 100% accurate emulation) or snes9x (if you want to run it on an underpowered tablet.)
  - GlitchMr 10y ago
    Pretty sure ZSNES is written in x86 assembly, so it wouldn't run all that well on Raspberry Pi, which is using ARM CPU considering that you would need to emulate an emulator.
    - colejohnson66 10y ago
      That's easy! Just use Bochs. Don't bother with recompilation, just use interpreted x86 :)
    - anonbanker 10y ago
      ZSNES hasn't been written in full asm since sometime after zsKnight died. Snes9x is written in C++, IIRC. As is MESS' snes emulator.
- captn3m0 10y ago
  I use fceux on my raspi model b, and it works flawlessly.
- frikk 10y ago
  Is yours the original Pi or Pi 2? The Pi 2 is like 6x more powerful than the Pi, and the Pi 3 is about that much more powerful than the Pi 2. I have the pi B and I can do SNES pretty decently with a little overclocking. I understand the Pi 2 can do SNES with ease, and N64 pretty well too. I can only imagine the Pi 3 will do N64 smoothly and more.

deverton 10y ago

Consider a Steam Link, http://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/ http://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/ or similar system to mirror the content from your PC. It will handle sending video/audio to your TV/arcade and sending the inputs back the desktop.

taneq 10y ago
How much latency does one of these add? It might be fine on a modern cinematic console shooter, but a large amount of the appeal of some old arcade games is their frame-perfect timing. I can't imagine that's helped by adding a round trip over the network, not to mention streaming the video back. That's gotta add 2-3 frames' latency at the very least.
- aallen90 10y ago
  The default settings have some noticeable latency (5-10ms), but changing the video encoding from "balanced" to "fast" drop it down to almost nothing. You can additionally plug the controller(s) into your PC to further remove any input delay. I can't vouch for emulated arcade games, but it works surprisingly well with a steam collection.
  - icelancer 10y ago
    Axiom Verge was unplayable on any settings I tried.
- douche 10y ago
  You want to make sure that you have the Steam Link wired into your network, rather than on wireless, because that makes a huge difference. Otherwise, it's gotten so they are pretty decent now. When the Links first came out, they were quite laggy and unstable, but after a hundred or so patches, it's settled down.
slantyyz 10y ago
I'm modding my old iCade cabinet to make a bartop with an 8" LCD monitor, and I opted to use an Atom based stick PC. I'm going to use the stick PC for running retro emulation locally, and streaming from Steam via the Windows Steam client. I'm also going to use an HDMI switcher so that I can connect it to a faster machine like my laptop as an option.

ratzinho87 10y ago

I am playing with a RetroPie based gaming system on an rpi3 and all nes and snes games I tried worked without any problem. It even works for PS1,though I only tried one game so far. Dos games are hit or miss, and it does horribly for N64.

Sander_Marechal 10y ago
I used to have problems on my Pi2 with N64, but enabling overclocking fixed those issues for me :-)
throwawayy2 10y ago
> Dos games are hit or miss, and it does horribly for N64. Use an optimized video plugin, such as (shameless plug): https://github.com/tachiweasel/mupen64plus-video-videocore https://github.com/tachiweasel/mupen64plus-video-videocore

ElCapitanMarkla 10y ago

In regards to SNES / NES sucking. I tried the retropie about a year ago on my Pi2 and there were no issues at all. Sega Genesis/Megadrive worked well too.