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I don't think it makes much sense as a business. AliExpress is littered with retro devices that have as much emulation oof as a 2010ish Mac Mini. There are a lo

I don't think it makes much sense as a business. AliExpress is littered with retro devices that have as much emulation oof as a 2010ish Mac Mini. There are a lot of little emulation focused Android/Linux boxes as well as emulation focused Mini PCs out there these days.

derefr 4y ago
I would love to know if any of these have the oomph for running Dolphin with hi-res texture packs. That sort of "going beyond the original experience" is the main reason I'd bother to use "real hardware" for emulation over something like a Pi or a jailbroken Switch. (Or, for that matter, a MiSTer.) I know that the sweet spot for "enhanced emulation" of (N64|Gamecube|Wii, XBox|XBox360, PSX|PS2) is somewhere higher than "my M1 Macbook Air", but lower than "Ryzen 4 and an RTX4090" — but figuring out exactly where this sweet-spot is, seems to be left as an exercise for the player; with the assumption that anyone who wants to do this already has a beefy gaming computer laying around, and wants to play on a monitor, rather than on their TV. It'd be nice if there were prebuilt appliances for playing enhanced early-3D-era games, that had been tested and shown to achieve a smooth 60FPS playing them at 4K or 1440p.
- OttoVonBizark 4y ago
  for emulation a midrange graphics card and a i7 or i9 intel chip with high single core speed from the last few years is best - you can get something second hand for very cheap that will perform emulation as well as the ryzen 4 4090
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  An M1 macbook is actually extreme overkill for emulating those consoles, it is on par with a GTX 1660.
  - derefr 4y ago
    To be clear, I'm not asking about just "emulating these consoles", but rather emulating these consoles with injected 4K assets; three-pass RDMAed 8K stencil-buffering for emulation of GPU-unified-memory in compositing of shadows + reflections; 16x SSAA to smooth off all the jaggies; etc. Y'know, all those options that, when turned on, make a four-generations-old game into a game that looks like it came out yesterday. You still don't need a 4090 to do all that — but you need more than a 1660, I promise you. (For one thing, just for holding all those 4K assets, for a game that never unloads anything because it thinks it has rather small assets!)
- pazimzadeh 4y ago
  That’s the thing about the 2009 Mac mini in particular…it came with a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M whereas most of the other models have integrated Intel graphics.
  - derefr 4y ago
    I actually used to have a 2009 Mac Mini (long since sold); I promise you, it didn't run Dolphin well even at 1080p. It barely kept up to 20FPS on some games.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    The 9400M is still an integrated card. It was better than what Intel had at the time but it still lacked it's own memory and is still terrible by today's standards. Only the G4 Mac Minis and some models of the 2011 Mac Mini have a dedicated GPu.
- nyanpasu64 4y ago
  I read "Ryzen 4" and did a double-take. Confusingly Zen 4 is the CPU generation, and Ryzen 3/5/7/9 is the performance tier (core count and price) within a generation.
pazimzadeh 4y ago
But can they run 32-bit Mac apps?
- goosedragons 4y ago
  For what? For Classic Mac OS gaming you could probably get Sheepshaver or Basilisk II running. Why you would need OS X 32bit apps on a retro gaming system I have no idea.
  - pazimzadeh 4y ago
    There are different degrees of retro. For example you might want to play Halo, Portal. Even though Microsoft bought it before it was released for Mac, there was still a decent size community which extended the original Mac demo: https://www.halomd.net/ https://www.halomd.net/

derefr 4y ago

I would love to know if any of these have the oomph for running Dolphin with hi-res texture packs. That sort of "going beyond the original experience" is the main reason I'd bother to use "real hardware" for emulation over something like a Pi or a jailbroken Switch. (Or, for that matter, a MiSTer.) I know that the sweet spot for "enhanced emulation" of (N64|Gamecube|Wii, XBox|XBox360, PSX|PS2) is somewhere higher than "my M1 Macbook Air", but lower than "Ryzen 4 and an RTX4090" — but figuring out exactly where this sweet-spot is, seems to be left as an exercise for the player; with the assumption that anyone who wants to do this already has a beefy gaming computer laying around, and wants to play on a monitor, rather than on their TV. It'd be nice if there were prebuilt appliances for playing enhanced early-3D-era games, that had been tested and shown to achieve a smooth 60FPS playing them at 4K or 1440p.

OttoVonBizark 4y ago
for emulation a midrange graphics card and a i7 or i9 intel chip with high single core speed from the last few years is best - you can get something second hand for very cheap that will perform emulation as well as the ryzen 4 4090
ricardobeat 4y ago
An M1 macbook is actually extreme overkill for emulating those consoles, it is on par with a GTX 1660.
- derefr 4y ago
  To be clear, I'm not asking about just "emulating these consoles", but rather emulating these consoles with injected 4K assets; three-pass RDMAed 8K stencil-buffering for emulation of GPU-unified-memory in compositing of shadows + reflections; 16x SSAA to smooth off all the jaggies; etc. Y'know, all those options that, when turned on, make a four-generations-old game into a game that looks like it came out yesterday. You still don't need a 4090 to do all that — but you need more than a 1660, I promise you. (For one thing, just for holding all those 4K assets, for a game that never unloads anything because it thinks it has rather small assets!)
pazimzadeh 4y ago
That’s the thing about the 2009 Mac mini in particular…it came with a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 9400M whereas most of the other models have integrated Intel graphics.
- derefr 4y ago
  I actually used to have a 2009 Mac Mini (long since sold); I promise you, it didn't run Dolphin well even at 1080p. It barely kept up to 20FPS on some games.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  The 9400M is still an integrated card. It was better than what Intel had at the time but it still lacked it's own memory and is still terrible by today's standards. Only the G4 Mac Minis and some models of the 2011 Mac Mini have a dedicated GPu.
nyanpasu64 4y ago
I read "Ryzen 4" and did a double-take. Confusingly Zen 4 is the CPU generation, and Ryzen 3/5/7/9 is the performance tier (core count and price) within a generation.

pazimzadeh 4y ago

But can they run 32-bit Mac apps?

goosedragons 4y ago
For what? For Classic Mac OS gaming you could probably get Sheepshaver or Basilisk II running. Why you would need OS X 32bit apps on a retro gaming system I have no idea.
- pazimzadeh 4y ago
  There are different degrees of retro. For example you might want to play Halo, Portal. Even though Microsoft bought it before it was released for Mac, there was still a decent size community which extended the original Mac demo: https://www.halomd.net/ https://www.halomd.net/