Author Topic: The best choice of emulator machine  (Read 3238 times)

kent79

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The best choice of emulator machine
« on: February 08, 2019, 11:37:01 AM »
I am looking as below mini device. It is base on APU and only TDP 35W. It is more powerful than RPI. What do you think so?

Asrock DeskMini A300, AMD 200GE, 8GB, 1TB HDD
below US$350
« Last Edit: February 08, 2019, 08:26:10 PM by kent79 »

jedione

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Re: The best choice of emulator machine
« Reply #1 on: February 08, 2019, 07:24:40 PM »
i think as long as built in pci or ad on ..

attached with DX for HLSL crt look...can happen i would be ok

that is my requirement,,       makes my cab grafix unforgettable ...mame rocks..

TB are super cheap now ,,,  wouldn't let that be a deciding factor....overall looks good..if you need the space

i just dont i run fulll towers from behind my cabs,    tried the pie ahhh.   nothing compared to just a quick

couple hundred pc set up smokes it all day long....................just my take though... :P

help a friend....

pecosdave

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Re: The best choice of emulator machine
« Reply #2 on: February 21, 2019, 07:52:33 AM »
The actual "in an arcade cabinet" build I built for someone else was an old Athlon x2 HP that was a company leftover.  It had built in Nvidia graphics on the chipset - that apparently doesn't work for crap with Linux so I had to put in an Nvidia card that was somewhere around 12 years old just like the host system.  It runs like a dream.

My kids build is an old Core 2 Duo iMac, I think it's 24" or so square, it was the big one of the era.  It has a built in Radeon.  It runs smooth as glass.

My old boss duplicated my arcade cabinet build - literally, he ran dd on the drive and stuck it into an identical desktop for his cabinet.

I can't give exactly numbers off the top of my head, but they all had around 4GB of RAM, one of them may have had 6GB, one of them may have had 2GB, not sure.

My point - the builds I've put together that are proven great aren't new stuff, it's all more than a decade old.  Unless you're really after the electricity savings or you want to run modern stuff too, look at the scrap-heap instead of the money pit.  If you want to leave it always-on maybe buy new just for the power/heat consumption.  If you want to turn it on only when you use it and want to show off for guest, look at the scrap-heap, you're likely to get more powerful equipment, for free, under $50, depends on what sort of resources you have, but I guarantee there's something aged out and collecting dust that SOMEONE locally has they'll just hand it over to you that would be great.

Aside from the iMac that already has an awesome, big squareish format screen, the arcade cabinet builds were great for monitors as well.  Since so many classic arcade games have vertical monitors, yet newer (1990s) arcade games were more of a "full screen" format from CRT TVs I found that closer to square monitors worked better for me than modern ones.  I built the arcade systems with left-over IBM graphics monitors from before everything went 16:9.  I tried a modern 16:9 monitor first, but I found that almost everything looked better overall with an old monitor that did something like 1600x1200 than anything wide.

Check out this chart and get something that supports a "red box" resolution.  You might even be happy with a Trinitron CRT off a scrap heap for a more authentic CRT feel.  I found a 1:1 monitor that I would love to have, but they're super expensive......

http://helpwiki.evergreen.edu/wiki/images/2/28/Resolutionchart.jpg

zpaolo11x

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Re: The best choice of emulator machine
« Reply #3 on: February 22, 2019, 09:04:09 AM »
I found a 1:1 monitor that I would love to have, but they're super expensive......

It seems square (1:1) LCD are only super expensive highest quality EIZOs or very poor, very low resolution displays.

zpaolo11x

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Re: The best choice of emulator machine
« Reply #4 on: February 22, 2019, 09:10:15 AM »
I only have partial experience with a low energy, low budget machine: it's based on a Celeron N3150 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+N3150+%40+1.60GHz&id=2546 and id the server I use to stream media to my devices using Plex. It's not a powerful device, but it does its job of transcoding and streaming. I tried putting MAME on that, and honestly I didn't dig too deep in settings etc, the OS is Ubuntu and performance, connected to a 1080p TV was quite good except sound kept stuttering if I turned on GLSL shaders.
This to say that you have to check carefully that the power of your CPU/GPU is not too low