While I think its true that the rPi has been good for arcade emulation as a social phenomenon - i.e. the market has expanded drastically - I think its disingenu

While I think its true that the rPi has been good for arcade emulation as a social phenomenon - i.e. the market has expanded drastically - I think its disingenuous to think of the rPi as the main driver behind emulation becoming mainstream. Devices such as the GP2X, Caanoo, GPH Wiz and Open Pandora gaming consoles have contributed immensely to the subject of game emulation, and these systems have been around far longer than the rPi - which did indeed benefit from all the work done to make emulation work on these machines previously (they use a similar class of device) .. I know for sure that dynamic recompilation, which is key to the way emulators gain the performance needed to run on these small machines, was well and truly happening in the scene before the rPi came along. In my opinion, the rPi just delivered the last 5% of the missing equation: cheap, broad availability.