Reply To: Pi replacement??

[epe9686518]

[quote=109579]Too expensive for too little, IMO. Sure it’s nice and the form factor is small, but it’s barely less expensive than some of the lower end Intel NUC models.

While a unit like this might be powerful enough to emulate just about everything up through the Dreamcast, the price point doesn’t justify what amounts to the ability to play a few more N64 games. PSX is almost 100% solid on the RPi 2, and this thing is not remotely powerful enough to emulate any/many PS2 or GCN games, so you end up paying $60 USD for a minor increase in the overall supported games list.

Not trying to rain on anyone’s parade. If you like this then by all means, back it – the more maker boards out there, the more makers and the more community we have, I just personally don’t see the benefits here.

IMO a better option would be for RetroPie to add support for something like the Odroid C1+. This is a Quad-Core 1.5ghz ARMv7 board with the exact RPi form factor and a Mali 450 graphics chip (which is probably at least on part with VC IV, if not better).

In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting one of these just to see if I could hack RetroPie into working on it. I can’t see it being that difficult to accomplish – mostly I’d just need to alter Retropie’s boot config to load the Mali 450 module instead of Videocore IV.

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I think your vastly under-estimating the power of this device… This wouldn’t simply allow us to play a “slight number” of new games… It would vastly increase the number of games we could play by 1000s… This would be able to run a modern version of MAME at full speed on most of those games, that alone would add a quite a few 1000 more games that we could now play that we weren’t able to before…

And yes the PSX emulation on PI is pretty much 100% full speed….. At low resolution with no advanced filtering or FSAA…Using this, you should be able to now run them at 720p or 1080p with high levels of FSAA and AF filtering that makes a massive difference in the level of detail of the games. You could also do this for N64, so not only would pretty much all N64 games run on this now at full speed, but you could again run them in much higher resolution and add the advance filtering to the games which greatly improves the graphics… So your not only adding more compatibility with games, you are greatly improving the look of the games too… So basically you wouldn’t just be getting access to more games with this, a lot more, those games would be at a much better level of quality too… For what comes down to a small overall increase in money…

We will never have a better bang for your buck than the Raspberry Pi, that is for sure. The amount of performance you get out of the Pi2 vs the price will probably be unbeatable.. That being said, a lot of us would love more games, at better quality going forward, and devices like UP are all possible options.

The one I supported and am looking forward to testing very soon is MagicStick.

This device, which will hopefully start shipping to backers in Dec, features a quad-core Intel Cherry Trail Z8300 Processor at 2.4GHz, 16 core Intel GPU, 8 GB of ram etc….This is basically quite a good PC in something roughly the size of the Pi. This not only has enough power and ram to run pretty much every emulator out there, at high resolutions with full filters and advanced effects… It also will be able to run a wide rage of PC games and PC apps as well as Android games…

Now the retail price is going to be $399 when its released, which is high, but again this is a full PC in something the size of a credit card…For those of us looking for better emulator support and performance but in a small form factor that is very portable this is quite exciting…I backed this and got one for $250 which I think is an incredible price for this device… I would like to see it retail around there to $300 range but maybe down the road…I am going to be running a lot of tests on this going forward to see what is possible on it.. Having full emulation of every system out there as well as a full desktop PC, complete with all apps and games, would be quite amazing!