
Raspberry Pi 4 and the State of Video Game Emulation - szczys
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/14/raspberry-pi-4-and-the-state-of-video-game-emulation/
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soganess
I can't say I understand the continued interest in RPI emulation. A few years
back it might have made sense, but small board options are much more varied
now.

The Nvidia Jetson Nano seems like a no brainer in the emulation space. It's
90$ with 4GB RAM (vs 70$ for a 4GB Pi4). For that extra Jackson, one gets
actual GPU cores with compute support baked in(not to mention mature graphics
drivers).

And its not like there is much of a trade-off for those CUDA cores. The Nano
is also roughly the same size as a Pi, has that 40 pin header (it even throws
in actual PCIe lanes)

I realize emulation is often CPU bound, but having a decent GPU on tap can't
hurt.

I don't do small boards, so maybe I am missing something?

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armitron
I never understood the hype about emulation on Raspberry Pi. Fidelity goes out
the window and the experience is very subpar. End result being the emulated
games don't even come close to the real thing, even for 16bit systems.

It's sad that all the effort spent on "optimizing" emulators for RPI is
essentially wasted, putting lipstick on a pig.

Spend a little more money and get a single board x86 computer (e.g. Odroid H2)
or a NUC and these issues go away.

~~~
vardump
> Spend a little more money and get a single board x86 computer (e.g. Odroid
> H2) or a NUC and these issues go away.

Or ditch emulation and buy an open source based MiSTer FPGA-board. No
Playstation generation consoles though, but 8-bit and 16-bit era consoles,
arcade systems and home computers are pretty accurate and are getting better
each day.

MiSTer also supports "486" core, although it's closer to ~16 MHz 386. Amiga
core is also pretty nice.

An FPGA based system can achieve higher accuracy than even the fastest x86
CPUs. Not sure if MiSTer is the ultimate solution yet, but the potential is
certainly there.

(Not affiliated with any MiSTer authors, just a fan of the project.)

[https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki](https://github.com/MiSTer-
devel/Main_MiSTer/wiki)

[http://www.atari-forum.com/viewforum.php?f=117](http://www.atari-
forum.com/viewforum.php?f=117)

~~~
naikrovek
There is no inherent accuracy with FPGA. Just like with software emulators,
FPGAs must be worked on extensively in order to achieve the desired accuracy.
I don't know why this myth keeps coming up. Lack of understanding that just
gets repeated over and over again, eventually being accepted as fact, I guess.

The accuracy you see with the Analogue products and with MiSTer are the result
of hard work towards the goal of accuracy, and not an inherent feature of
using an FPGA.

When connected to a CRT, an FPGA solution can provide much better end-to-end
latency than a software solution running on an operating system, that's
certainly true, but again that's not inherent to running on an FPGA; it's
inherent to running without an operating system that does display composition.

~~~
vardump
> There is no inherent accuracy with FPGA. Just like with software emulators,
> FPGAs must be worked on extensively in order to achieve the desired
> accuracy.

Very much true, and sorry if I didn't make it clear enough. However, there's
inherent potential for the ultimate accuracy without performance penalty.
That's what I meant by saying it's getting better every day. You couldn't say
that about a perfectly accurate system.

> FPGA solution can provide much better end-to-end latency than a software
> solution running on an operating system

CPU based emulators can actually reach _very_ low latency with modern beam
racing techniques. See [https://www.blurbusters.com/blur-busters-lagless-
raster-foll...](https://www.blurbusters.com/blur-busters-lagless-raster-
follower-algorithm-for-emulator-developers/).

