Reply To: The way to max SNES-performance

[cacophony555]

a). For my original Pi setup I absolutely needed an overclock to achieve a decent framerate on snes games. Like you I just had a passive heatsink and I went with the 900 Mhz overclock. There is no way to achieve decent snes sound on the pi 1 as it simply doesn’t have the necessary horsepower. Some people don’t notice but if you try certain games (or know what to listen for) it isn’t even close to passable. You’ll need to upgrade to a Pi 2 if you want decent snes sound emulation.

b & d) For snes on the original pi your best option is the standalone piSnes (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pisnes/). This standalone version is part of retropie though they may have altered the name slightly.

c) In theory you can get slightly better performance by forcing the output resolution to something lower like VGA but I can’t say I’ve noticed a difference.

e) Not sure about this one. What phone are you talking about here? It’s possible that it’s a newer arm architecture that’s more efficient (and hence not directly comparable using just Mhz). It’s also possible that the emulator itself has been optimized more for that platform.