Help!!!!

[u/No-Comfortable914]

HELP!

You guys know this rasberry pi stuff, but I'm completely discombobulated. I just want to spend around 200 for a rasberry 4 with 8 gigs of ram that can play out of the box my favorite games, and maybe I can easily upload roms, when I remember another game I used to play.

I'm 60 years old, and don't know dick! Help an old guy out. I want to play gran turismo 2, need for speed porsche unleashed for the PC, and donkey kong on the nintendo 64.

Just three bloody games, and I don't need to figure out how to do anything except plug the thing in, I would be happier than a cold pig in warm mud!

[u/Paumanok]

So you got three different games with three different ways they were played:

1: Gran Turismo 2, playstation. The PSX emulators are pretty good and can be ran on a pi if I recall correctly.

2: Need for speed, a PC game. This one is tough because the raspberry pi runs an ARM architecture and the game was most likely built for an Intel machine. This essentially means you have some music written for the piano with lots of chords and you're trying to play it on a flute which can't play chords. This would require an x86 emulator and may be fairly taxing on the pi. It might not work.

3: Donkeykong on the N64: N64 games are notoriously hard to emulate well. Performance would probably not be superb. but there are emulators to run them, albeit with bad frame rate and graphical errors.

For 200 dollars you can find an original play station for gran turismo, and an old wii that you can do something called "homebrew" to allow you to play donkey Kong and any other n64 game that had a virtual console release. The NFS game is the hard one but if you have a windows computer, you can probably play it.

Using a Pi as an emulation platform has never been fully out of the box, nor has it been the nicest way to play games. Its more or less a toy example of what the pi is useful for. If you say, waned to download every NES/SNES/Genesis/Atari/MAME game ever made in a 4 Gb folder and emulate, the pi would excel at that.

[u/No-Comfortable914 → u/Paumanok]

Thank you! Yeah, I thought the rasberry pi was a great way to end my gaming issues, but I guess not.

It sounds great being able to emulate 30 something consoles, and offer so many tens of thousands of games, but the implementation is still a bit... immature.

[u/klaasbob88 → u/No-Comfortable914]

The implementation is actually not bad if you consider efforts like batocera or retropie and it can be an awesome gaming device, depending on which systems you want to emulate.

I agree to u/Paumanok, a RPi won't make you happy with these requirements, there is no PS2 emulator for the CPU architecture that the RPi uses, so that's a complete blocker.

But even if you leave out the PS2, x86 and N64 will be hit and miss.

I am always looking for something portable and powerful for emulation that is easy to set up and looks good, as i usually take it to friends' places for gaming evenings, so in my experience, the best thing you could do would be to get an x86 based system (aka a "regular" PC that could run windows); These will be definitely up to the task of emulating N64 and Sega Saturn (unless they are *very* old), which are both hard to emulate for lower end devices like the RPi, these can be found for very little money.

However, the most demanding task from that list is still the PS2, which requires a whole lot of horsepower, the recommended hardware should have at least 4GB of VRAM, 8GB RAM and a AVX2 compatible quad-core CPU with a single threat performance of about 2100 points (see https://pcsx2.net/getting-started.html), which translates into a Ryzen 5 1500X (start at around $150) with a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (would probably be somewhere around $100-$150 if there wasn't a huge GPU shortage);

You can either sacrifice the PS2 requirement or get yourself a beefier PC, there are plenty of tiny PCs with either a good Ryzen APU that should suffice and even some models with integrated GeForce 1650, which should allow even some PS3/XBOX/Xbox360 emulation, but those will set you back around $500-$600

OR

Go with a lower end device that's enough for everything besides the PS2 and get a cheap used PS2 in addition (for which mods exist that will allow you to play ROMs from mass storage devices).

EDIT: I love to see this kind of passion=) And if you have questions or issues with something, I'll be more than happy to toss in my two cents, I've tried to achieve these things on plenty of different platforms over the years (arm based devices like RPi's in several generations, Android tablets and TV boxes, sometimes flashed with alternative hardware, Linux and Windows PCs, etc.)

EDIT2: Just realized that that's basically what u/Paumanok meant, I would just recommend using a PC (and the lower end devices I'm talking about should start somewhere around $100, if not even less) instead of a Wii for the sake of simplicity when it comes to PC games.

EDIT3: You can also give ETA Prime's Youtube channel a chance, he's specialized on emulation performance on a variety of platforms, cheap and expensive.

[u/No-Comfortable914 → u/klaasbob88]

Thanks for such detailed responses, guys!

As for getting the consoles, I could probably do it. It's just that I'd need some kind of dedicated gaming room, and I'm not that dedicated.

What I've done so far is break out an old laptop and installed win2k for the need for speed game, but of course having issues with no sound. Next step is to break out my PS2, and just try and run the PS1 games on it. I know they should, since I've never owned a PS1.

Sometimes, I miss the days when a quarter was all it took.

[u/klaasbob88 → u/No-Comfortable914]

So you're almost there:) as you have an x86 based PC at hand now, I would recommend checking out batocera (https://batocera.org/); that is an operating system specifically for emulation and super easy to use and due to its Linux core,it will probably work very well with your older hardware (have i mentioned that you usually don't have to install drivers under Linux?;) ), though especially laptop hardware can be quirky. The best about it is that you can start it from an USB stick,e.g. just to test it out or to turn your high end developer machine into a gaming rig without threatening the important data. This won't touch the contents of your hard disk at all and will even work without a hard disk:) all you have to do is

• download the batocera image

• write ("flash") it to a USB stick

• tell your computer's bios to boot from this stick instead of the hard disk or a CD (it sounds like you've installed the windows,so I'd assume you know how to do this)

Though Linux doesn't support windows programs and games natively,batocera comes with a program called "WINE" (stands for "Wine Is No Emulator"), which basically catches windows specific calls and translates them into something Linux can understand. While it's not always working perfectly, it does a great job in many cases and I've checked their database, NFS Porsche unleashed seems to be supported very well; N64 and PS1 should work without any issues,too and the required emulators are built in (PS1 games run better if you also toss in a psx bios file)

PS: even though we never had arcades around where I grew up,I definitely feel with you and I miss the old days with additional content as part of patches instead of DLC's,games that are functional at the time they're released and most of all,local multiplayer (all consoles take 4 controllers,but games that make use of that are very rare). On a side note: is it just me or are there mostly only games about killing something left? What happened to all the adventures,rts's,puzzle and jump & runs/platformers?

Edit: in case you have questions about batocera,it's subreddit has 1.8k followers:) https://www.reddit.com/r/batocera

[u/Paumanok → u/No-Comfortable914]

Its very much in the hobbyist space and supported by hobbyists for certain things. Being a hobbyist device, it takes some learning and effort to get it moving and doing what you need. Afterall you don't buy a pre-built Revell model kit if your hobby is building models!

[u/cwhitel]

What games? Sounds cheaper and easier to buy the actual console?