Can you go into a little more detail on how well PS1 emulation is working? Specifically for FF7 but also some other titles.
I'm about to buy a few RPi2 for multiple boxes and if these can easily do PS1 I would love to know!
The PS1 games play very well on the RPi2, for some reasons I just had issues with the F1 game serie, but all the other games I tested worked fine. I tested the beginning of FF7 and like the other games, it worked perfectly.
However, you need to know a few things:
- The RPi2 is good enough to play the PS1 games, but not good enough to play them with the enhanced resolution feature enabled, which makes the games look much better. Maybe the pi can handle it with some light games, but otherwise the frame rate will be too slow.
- The emulator I use to emulate the PS1 is pcsx-rearmed, you can find it in 2 versions, standalone and libretro. The standalone version is a little faster (maybe more games can be played with the enhanced resolution option), but I never managed to get the games displayed in their original 4/3 ratio (on my 16/9 screen), there is no option to change that. So if you have a 4/3 monitor or if you don't care to play with a stretched image (personally I hate that
), you can use it. Otherwise you will have to use the Libretro version, which is actually the version almost everyone uses I think, it's perfectly stable (the standalone one should be stable too, but I didn't test it a lot), it's easier to configure since it's a retroarch core, so you can easily integrate it with the other emulators of your system.
- FF7 is a multi-disc game, so you have to decide how you want to swap the discs, it requires some manipulations to do it during the game. I personally use the method that packs all the discs in one big pbp file, it's a lot of manipulations to create the file, but once you have it, everything is easier while you are playing, since you don't have to do anything to swap the discs. The only problem comes from the very big games like FF8, because the pbp file is bigger than 2GB, and the pi can't handle file bigger than 2GB (it's a 32-bit limitation), for example FF8 and Fear-Effect 2 are concerned by this issue and you will have to keep the discs separated.
FYI, as "emulator manager" I use Retropie (I start from the RetroPie image), as frontend I use AM (rather than EmulationStation).
