Mini PC for emulation.

[Venom]

I was thinking of buying a mini PC and using emulators for the DC, WII and MAME to. This may even at a push do WIIU not sure, ETAPRIME has not reviewed it yet !

https://www.ebuyer.com/990698-asus-amd-ryzen-5-4500u-ddr4-mini-pc-pn50-bbr048md

I do have the original consoles already with GDEMU and HD, its more an issue with limited space and thought would build this as Windows deskstop so kids can use it for homework too.

Just wondered if any people with originals had emulated and never looked back , or if you think no was better on the original hardware.

Dont want to spend £300 on new pc if people have done this before and thought was not worth it.

I'll just find a cheaper mini pc instead !

The DC with redream from what I can tell though may even look better emulated.

I assume using 360 controllers is fine for DC and the WII you use a dolphin bar with original controllers.

I looked at the intel nuc but overprices and apparently fans are really loud ?

Anyone been down pc emulation. Obviouslty these have limited graphics upgrade so thinking the ryzen one .

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

 

[mlynn]

That looks like a very nice new CPU in a tiny case, but there are additional costs to consider as it is barebones:

1. 8Gb DDR-4 RAM ~£30
2. 500Gb SSD ~£50
3. Windows 10 License ~£100 (Ebuyer)
£329.99 + £180 = £509.99

A few months ago on eBay I bought a refurbished HP i5-4590 (4th Gen) from a Microsoft Certified Refurbisher with Windows 10 (8Gb, 500Gb HDD) for £79.99. It's a bit bulkier than a nice new SFF PC but at less then the price of a Windows 10 license I cannot complain.

Most emulators will run fine on it unless you aim to run a WII emulator or possibly a PS2 emulator on it or something in MAME with much higher GPU requirements. It runs Outrun 2006 on it very well, except my crappy controller keeps going from analog to digital while the game is in progress.

For performance comparison:
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-4590-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-4500U/2604vsm1052299

If the new PC was inside an arcade cab it would be kind of hard to use it for any other purpose than gaming. It's more your game selection and configuration that's important so you can swap in any PC with minimal configuration changes in the future. Just my 2 cents.
mlynn2020-11-29 22:30:58

 

[Venom]

Or perhaps I should sneek a new xbox in, if only I could run a Windows 10 desktop in the dev mode
Emualtors I can see just getting better and better, its got the grunt for it !

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGAjhjp8dnI

 

[thermal_treasure]

Pretty cool seeing arcade/console stuff up and running on the new xbox. Even PS2/GC stuff looks good. I think my next mame/emu machine will be a Chuwi Larkbox if they can sort out the heat issues