Dear Lifehacker, I want to build an emulation station for retro gaming, but there are so many options! Custom PC, Raspberry Pi, Android tablet… Which is the best? What are the pros and cons of each? Sincerely, Nintendon’t
Dead N,
There are a billion devices out there, and if there’s a screen on it, there’s probably a video game emulator for it. But a few choice options exist, each with their pros and cons, so let’s run through some of the best. Which is “best” depends on your budget, what you want to play and what hardware you already have. Here are three solutions that are great for three different types of players.
The Low-Cost, Low-Power Solution Best for Game from the ’80s: Raspberry Pi
Up until recently, I did my emulation on a Sega Dreamcast. Then, the Raspberry Pi came out and nowadays it’s my go-to retro game station that plays everything I care about.
What I like about the Raspberry Pi is it’s cost ($US35), the fact it takes a variety of inputs, and the fact it hooks up to a TV without any special cables. It’s also tiny, which means it doesn’t waste much space around my TV, and if I want to I can pack it up and bring it to a friend’s house. You can also pack that Raspberry Pi into all kinds of cool cases to fit your needs.
That said, the Raspberry Pi is still a DIY option. So, you’ll likely have to put up with some setup woes, as well as the basic amount of time it takes to get everything installed and working. You also get what you pay for. For $US35 you’re restricted to emulating older systems and you won’t be able to play anything newer than a Super Nintendo game. For me, that’s perfect, but if you’re looking to emulate newer systems (even just a Nintendo 64), the Raspberry Pi won’t cut it.
If you’re looking for something like the Raspberry Pi without the DIY aspect, the $US99 OUYA is a solid alternative. You’ll still need to do some basic setup, and controller support is a bit sporadic, but it’s one of the cheapest plug-and-play solutions.
The Mid-Cost, Mid-Powered Solution for Portable Gaming: A Tablet
If you want a little more power than a Raspberry Pi, but you don’t want to buy an actual computer, a tablet — either Android or iPad — is a fantastic way to play old games. A tablet can be a portable gaming system or get hooked up to a TV, and they can emulate a lot of systems.
For Android, we like RetroArch because it packs in a bunch of emulators, from the Nintendo Entertainment System all the way up to the PlayStation 1. Once that’s set up, you can hook up a controller, connect it to your TV and have a portable media centre with you all the time. iPad users can also use RetroArch, but you need to jailbreak to use it. With the iPad, you can use a controller with all your games, not just your emulators, so you can turn it into a powerful gaming machine with a little hacking. It’s possible to run emulators on a non-jailbroken iPad, but you’ll want to jailbreak if you’re using it primarily for emulation.
Of course, tablets aren’t exactly cost-effective. If you don’t plan on using it for something other than emulation, it’s probably not worth the money. They’re also not that powerful, and while they emulate more systems than a Raspberry Pi, they still stop at around the first Playstation era. While a tablet is fully portable, playing games using touchscreen buttons is never fun, so chances are you’ll always want to pack a controller with you wherever you go. If you want something truly portable, a hacked PSP can emulate just about everything a tablet can, and they can be found inexpensively on ebay.
The High-Powered, Future-Proof Solution for Almost Every Game: A PC or Mac
Low-cost choices are great and all, but if you want a full-blown emulation station, a PC or Mac is your best choice. You can emulate a lot more systems and even add special mods to older games to make them play better.
You can use any computer you have around the house for emulation or make your own media centre to do emulation and a lot more. Once you’re set up, you just need to get the software. Mac users can download OpenEmu to get all the classic emulators in your app. Windows users need to download each individually. All that said, emulators almost always launch on PC and Mac first, and other platforms later, so you’ll always be on the cutting edge with a computer.
No matter how you cut it, building a PC just for emulation is more expensive than most of the other options. If you already have a computer you want to use, that cuts down on the cost, but you probably don’t want to leave it connected to your TV all day as a dedicated system.
It comes down to this: usually, the “best” platform for a emulation is the one you already own (as long as it plays the systems you want). If you have a computer made in the last five or six years, it will run every emulator perfectly. If you have a tablet you can emulate most classic systems. If you don’t have either, the Raspberry Pi is cheap and easy to start with. No matter what, you can build a dedicated emulation machine pretty cheaply, and you won’t have to worry about having 20 old-school consoles hooked up to the TV anymore.
Cheers
Lifehacker
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Comments
9 responses to “Ask LH: What’s The Best Device For Emulating My Retro Games?”
If you want the best and most accurate setup, a PC (how powerful depends on what you want to be emulating, for example MAME ROMs for late 90’s early 00’s games need more grunt), connected to a good TV/monitor, passing through a scanline generator (such as this http://arcadeforge.net/SLG3000/Scanline-Generator-SLG3000::12.html) and using retro controllers.
No mention of the Ouya console at all?
Nope.
lol no
Umm, in the Raspberry Pi section “$US99 OUYA is a solid alternative. You’ll still need to do some basic setup, and controller support is a bit sporadic, but it’s one of the cheapest plug-and-play solutions.”
A modded original Xbox does a great job for everything up to GBA and 90s arcade games.
Rasperrypu is pretty dismal for a lot of emulation.
I just went through the whole Raspberry Pi set up to make an emulation machine.
I highly recommend it, but I won’t lie, it was highly frustrating at times.
The sd card image you can get and use straight away is great for a fuss free set up, but it’s not as up to date as the source is, the default emulators aren’t necessarily the best emulators and controller config can be a pain for some people.
The initial set up took maybe 4 hours? But overall it took me about two weeks to build something I was happy with. I swapped out the SNES emulator, overclocked it, wrote config files for two player input on all emulators, descriptions/cover art for each ROM, etc.
It was a great learning experience and now I have a fun little machine to revisit the past when I feel like it.
If you put in the extra effort with your set up, the Raspberry Pi will run everything up to SNES flawlessly. A few SNES games have issues (I think Star Fox is one) due to being unable to emulate some required chip or something, I can’t remember. Aside from that, everything is amazing. The latest work people have been doing to get PS1 and N64 working is also looking promising. I’m not holding my breath for N64 but I’ve seen a few PS1 games running at playable framerates.
Or, alternatively, you could just buy something that requires less messing around lol.
The whole point was to learn something new…
I learnt basic unix, how to compile source code, write .cfg files, I even learnt about HDMI groups and more. To me, it was a valuable experience and far better than just buying a Ouya.
Each to their own though.
intel duo 2 PC will power any game from the mid 90’s and earlier, console or arcade
I used a frontend called maximus aracde to sort the emulators and chucked it in a coffeetable
http://youtu.be/t7CQWdDaq14
You’re all forgrtting Puppy Linux Arcade! Useful on just about any PC as it’s very small. You can customize the Rom Boot Loader so it just boots up with emulator/rom access (much like an xbox). Very nimble and the quickest OS you’ve ever used.