6 replies to this topic

[Teddy Rogers]

Has anyone built a gaming rig for running emulators? I was thinking about a nettop because they are very small and can be hooked up on or near a TV but lets be honest they are hopeless running anything mildly heavy. My next thought was to build a system around a mini-atx board giving me the option of a decent CPU with a dedicated graphics card (which would probably be bigger than the motherboard itself). However it would mean getting a biggish case with power supply, etc. I'm after something low-key. Any ideas?

Ted.

[mudlord]

What systems do you hope to emulate?

Anything thats less than GC/PS2 does not require a beefy GPU, only a very good CPU.

Edited by mudlord, 18 December 2011 - 01:23 PM.

[Teddy Rogers]

I have various systems I want to storage and have emulated from the one box, mainly; PS1, PS2, Amiga, GBA and Dreamcast. Possibly I may throw on a copy of MAME but that is not of importance. I was looking at Gigabyte's E350N-USB3 board which obviously comes with AMD's E-350 APU and it's built in Radeon HD 6310. The only problem I see with this kind of setup is the CPU being a bottleneck but I'd imagine it should run most things okay. I'm not even going to consider the Atom for this...

Ted.

[chickenbutt]

I have a asus 1155 ITX with a i3 and 128bit 2GB GF 430, the card is shorter length wise, but most ITX cases that support a discreet slot don't support most card offset width..

The new fusion setups with high SP APU/IGPU are actually perfect for this..

[mudlord]

Teddy Rogers, on 18 December 2011 - 01:58 PM, said:

I have various systems I want to storage and have emulated from the one box, mainly; PS1, PS2, Amiga, GBA and Dreamcast. Possibly I may throw on a copy of MAME but that is not of importance. I was looking at Gigabyte's E350N-USB3 board which obviously comes with AMD's E-350 APU and it's built in Radeon HD 6310. The only problem I see with this kind of setup is the CPU being a bottleneck but I'd imagine it should run most things okay. I'm not even going to consider the Atom for this...

Ted.

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/AMD_Fusion

Actually, it seems Bobcat stuff is not enough. A phenom x4 or something along those lines, on the other hand....
For PS2, something like a gtx460 would be enough. Older systems stress the CPU a lot more, since all that most emulators do is plot pixels.

For more questions, don't hesitate to ask...as I used to work on emulation stuff (like N64 graphics emulation) before I got into RE *shameless plug...*

Edited by mudlord, 19 December 2011 - 03:54 PM.

[chickenbutt]

Cause bobcat has the same core config as legacy HD IGPs. PCSX2 and Xeon probably need at least 128bit card with 90+ SPs. Unless you compensate with more threads like with quad core or hyper-threading to scale resources.

I don't think any of those emulators use SSE instruction sets either..The devs usually just fight to get it stable and rest when that happens..

[mudlord]

You'd be surprised. Dolphin uses SSE quite a bit, even SSE2. And OpenCL for texture conversions.
Same with Project64 for N64 emulation. Its RSP recompiler uses SSE a lot for raw speed.