HTPCs and Emulation. Ryzen?

[linuxares]

Except the Shield TV doesn't run Dolphin perfectly, and I can't imagine PS2 would run well if Dolphin struggles.

Meh it does it's job so far. But I mostly used it for HTPC options and Gamestreaming

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Meh it does it's job so far. But I mostly used it for HTPC options and Gamestreaming

OP specifically wants flawless PS2.
For that, a proper PC is pretty much a requirement.

@ital Like @rmorris003 said, this sort of thing is pretty much ETA Prime's specialty. You'll no doubt be able to find the perfect thing for your emulation needs on his channel.

 

[notimp]

It would be great if these Chinese companies that keep cranking out Android/Linux handhelds would simply take the same chipset and whack it in a set top box thats open for us to do what we want with.

They are doing what they can - access to ARM CPUs for chinese Android box makers (they are a niche business - the ones that would sell boxes with above that Google Stick thingy capabilities) is extremely limited. They often end up using Rockchip as a manufacturer for their APU (CPU and GPU combined), and those are still a little more behind, when it comes to performance per watt.

Because its niche, the first manufacturer thats likely to produce an android box with the performance ceiling you'd need - probably will be NVidia - and only after Nintendo ordered chips from them for the Switch 2. Reading tea leaves at this point, but its not unlikely, that this will be the outcome.

 

[ital]

Would a PC with an AMD E 350 processor and integrated Radeon HD6310 graphics be able to handle Dreamcast smoothly at 1080p in your opinion?

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-E-350-Notebook-Processor.40941.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6310.40952.0.html

 

[Jokey_Carrot]

Would a PC with an AMD E 350 processor and integrated Radeon HD6310 graphics be able to handle Dreamcast smoothly at 1080p in your opinion?

https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-E-350-Notebook-Processor.40941.0.html
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-6310.40952.0.html

That is oddly specific.

 

[ital]

Of course, I've a specific machine in mind with those specs.

 

[Silent_Gunner]

Hey, just so happened upon this post here!

So, I have a few questions. What is your budget? How do you want your emulation solution to look on your home theater? Are you even going to be connecting this to a home theater in the first place?

Because, you see, right now isn't really a good time to be jumping into PC gaming with brand spanking new parts, IMHO. Video cards, especially the higher end ones, are, if not out of stock, very expensive, and even more expensive if someone is straight up scalping them on eBay. You could go with some used cards on eBay for sure and come out with a good video card...or you could risk getting someone's video card that they used for cryptocurrency mining. You're gonna want a dedicated video card of some kind to do everything you want on this PC, as I can tell you from my experience with building in three different mini-ITX cases that they are some of the more frustrating cases to work in. Cable management can be a no-sell depending on what kind of case you're working in.0

And then you have motherboards which, while not scalped to the extent video cards are, the higher end ones definitely aren't as available as the lower or mid-tier mobos atm. And if the motherboard on a PC dies, it's equal to tearing down a building; a PITA, a lot of time and money being spent to get everything in your hands, put it all back together, and hopefully not have it happen again.


And then, what kind of case are you looking to get? Depending on what you get, you may have to either get a mobo with Thunderbolt 3 support for an eGPU if you want a dedicated video card that simply won't fit into the case.

These are the kinds of things you'll want to consider, and you can never do too much research on possibilities for this build you want to put together. Trust me when I say there's been times where I put together a build, I learn about a new thing here and there, and go, "why didn't I consider THAT!?" when putting a build together.

If I were you, I'd go to PCPartPicker.com, create an account, and put something together for us to look at. It will tell you what's compatible with what, list out the different retailers, both online and local, that carry the item, their prices, even the price history, reviews on different products, the whole nine yards. It's really been a help to me in my time as a PC gamer, and I think it will help you as well!

 

[ital]

Very helpful. This is why I say that the PC side has increased exponentially since the days of EMS/XMS memory and wrestling with base 640K.

I'm looking at spending around £500 tops, preferably pre built new but I'm not averse to getting a second hand one. Spec wise I want something that runs Teknoparrot properly so its got to have an Nvidia GPU. Probably a GTX 1650 in a small Mini case like this:


CPU Intel Core i7-9850H
Core 6 Cores 12 Threads, 2.6GHz, Up to 4.6GHz
Cache 16M
Display core NVIDIA GTX 1650 4GB (soldered on board, Can not upgrade)
RAM 16GB DDR4-2666 included
Solid State Disk Support 1* M.2 2280 SSD, (NVME 512G SSD Included)

These are currently going for around £800 which is out of my budget but it seems like it should be perfect for emulation and should easily handle stuff like Lindbergh, PS2, GC, Wii and even higher stuff for quite a while. What say?

 

[Silent_Gunner]

Very helpful. This is why I say that the PC side has increased exponentially since the days of EMS/XMS memory and wrestling with base 640K.

I'm looking at spending around £500 tops, preferably pre built new but I'm not averse to getting a second hand one. Spec wise I want something that runs Teknoparrot properly so its got to have an Nvidia GPU. Probably a GTX 1650 in a small Mini case like this:


CPU Intel Core i7-9850H
Core 6 Cores 12 Threads, 2.6GHz, Up to 4.6GHz
Cache 16M
Display core NVIDIA GTX 1650 4GB (soldered on board, Can not upgrade)
RAM 16GB DDR4-2666 included
Solid State Disk Support 1* M.2 2280 SSD, (NVME 512G SSD Included)

These are currently going for around £800 which is out of my budget but it seems like it should be perfect for emulation and should easily handle stuff like Lindbergh, PS2, GC, Wii and even higher stuff for quite a while. What say?

Get a job, and get the PC you truly want out of the gate. I made compromises back in 2016 thanks to false expectations that I had back then about my life and what I was capable of.

You may not be able to afford it financially atm, but you can get a job to where you'd be able to.

Also, and this is just my opinion, but don't go the pre-built route if you can. You have no idea what kind of hardware is in there, and are limited by what that market offers.

And not to mention, I thought you were aiming for a Ryzen setup?

 

[ital]

I'm not that much of a nerd and this isn't really important for me to sweat like that because I'm literally going to emulating a handful of newer games as the PSC handles pretty much everything upto PSX perfectly. Therefore this isn't some ePeen polishing contest for me, just a question of functionality and one that I'd rather not devote any more money or attention to the specifics than I have to as there are far more interesting things in life one can devote their attention to. Definitely not going to faff around with building one, my time is worth far more than the money saved.



As for Ryzen, apparently Teknoparrot only works with NVidia GPUs for some of the titles so that is an essential, everything else is flexible.

The issue with PCs - and one of the reasons I walked away - is everything has an incremental alternative so you can wish to spend £100 then think "Well, this Turbosuperflapperdapperbitchslapperpimpmacker 2.0S is only an extra £10 but the upgrade after than is only another £20 so if I spend £130 I'm actually saving money... but then look at...". This craziness applies across the board and the entire field moves ridiculously fast in pursuit of shiny when all I want is a machine to run a handful of new emulators with no frameskip and 1-3 times resolution boost.

Also amusingly my initial budget was around £250 which then doubled to £500 just looking around so LOLs all round. The PC world doing what it does best.

Just looking back at the PC field with its acronyms, multithreaded core options and various other BS is just so eugchk as you need a PhD in nerdom just to comprehend the crap (not to mention all the time tweaking and configuring to get it just right) whereas Macs and consoles just work but all of the emulators I want are on PC so here we are...

Someone could clean up if they made a high power all in one emu box which was all preconfigured with all the crap hidden out of sight. I'd buy one.

 

[Silent_Gunner]

*inhales deeply*

*exhales the same*

So, here's the part where I have to be upfront with you, to ask you how much you want this PC.

For one thing, you don't need a "PhD in nerdom". Every mainstream CPU in a modern gaming PC these days are multi-threaded. Really, as long as you're getting something that has 8 full-on cores, with or without hyperthreading (or SMT as it seems to be known as nowadays, and that's not referring to the series of RPGs with teenagers using computers to recruit and summon demons), and running at 4.0+ GHz base or boosted, you should be able to emulate anything that's on PC atm in terms of the "processing power required to translate proprietary console CPU code into x86 Windows/Linux/Mac/*insert any other OS* code" here.

When you're emulating mainstream systems (as in, not handhelds, as they tend to be somewhat easier to emulate until you get to the 3DS/Switch/maybe the Vita) past the PS1/N64, you're gonna want a CPU with a strong IPC (instructions per core) count, as they usually are coded to take advantage of only one or two cores unless if you're playing around with some very specific settings in PCSX2 to get it to use every CPU core it can.

The video card is just there to provide some more muscle to enhance the graphics beyond their original resolution. Where it becomes necessary is at the top ends of emulation; think RPCS3, Xenia, running Wii/GC games with HD texture packs.


And as for tweaking and configuring things to get them just right...welcome to PC gaming. That's just sort of the name of the game. That being said, it's not as complicated as you're making it out to be. There's programs like GeForce Experience you can use to go and fine tune a good set of PC games that you may have on Steam to run optimally on your PC. Personally, I find it to sometimes be a bit more conservative when it tries to configure things for my tastes, so I personally just configure it myself, which isn't too hard for most of the games I'm playing on PC.

But I digress; I haven't used Teknoparrot myself. As far as arcade ports of games, a lot of the more "arcade-y" games that I imagine I'd want and actually play are either on Steam, or can be played to what's probably arcade perfection on other emulators, as part of the reason arcades have and currently are dying out is that the "arcade experience" for a lot of the games isn't as necessary hardware-wise outside of maybe including a special control interface. It used to be that the arcade far outpaced what a console could output in terms of graphical and sound fidelity back in the 90's. But now? With modern PCs, let alone consoles? It simply isn't necessary, and if it was me, I'd rather just play the PC ports if they're available just because I can imagine it'd be less hassle to do that as opposed to doing everything one has to do to get what is ultimately probably another Windows .exe file with a specific hardware configuration in mind to work on a hardware configuration it wasn't coded for.

 

[ital]

Very handy, thanks for sharing your insight.

The nerdom part comes in the sheer amount of variables and acronyms. i7 being better than i9, hyper threaded, GPUs with lower numbers being more powerful than those with larger numbers, different memory types etc...

There is simply way too much info that you need to know to navigate this sphere for something like emulation compared to the ideal solution which would be an Android box with a lot more grunt. That alone would take out so much of the faff but it doesn't exist yet so here we are.

Ideally what I'm looking for is something around about the size of PS4, about as quiet and powerful enough to emulate everything perfectly upto PS3 at 1080p/60FPS output for around £500 max.

 

[Silent_Gunner]

As far as cases like the PS4 goes, closest thing I can think of is the Sentry by Dr. Zaber (which you basically need to pre-order on the Indiegogo page to get your hands on, and requires one to really plan around its unique setup to get something that'd work. Unfortunately, none of these cases have ever appeared on PCPartPicker last I checked, which would have been recently) or the Fractal Design Node 202...which is more of the size of an OG Xbox One, except with more of a reason to be the size that it is. The only other option would be the Silverstone RVZ02/03. You could even go with something so small that it had me envious of it like the Ghost S1.

But let me paint a picture for you as to how outmatched your price point is to your expectations, assuming that nothing in this build is coming from a previous build, which you seem to imply, but haven't outright stated, so please correct me if I'm wrong in that assumption:

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Silent_Gunner/saved/DgbkJx

When I went to go and to a conversion of 500 pounds to USD, it came out to $686.80. Now, PCPartPicker doesn't have the i7-9850H even listed. And here's where I should stop and inform you that, while I have never personally used the and i7 CPU that goes beyond the x7x0 numbers in a given Intel CPU generation, I have read that those CPUs have compromises and don't support some of the standards that, say, a full fledged i7-9700k would, in this case. It's something I read on the PCSX2 forums long ago back when I was building my first PC.



Personally speaking, it sounds like what you want simply doesn't exist. Android TV boxes aren't sold to enthusiast gamers like you and I; they're sold to a family or someone who doesn't have a smart TV and wants to add "smart" features to it. They aren't decked out with some x86 processor; if anything, its some mobile chip or an ARM processor that simply isn't strong enough to approach what a full-fledged PC can, and while it may get the emulation capabilities to do so one day, that day is very far off from even being something that I would classify as being practical as opposed to experimental like Dolphin is on the Nvidia Shield and the Nintendo Switch.


Are you looking for an AIO box to do everything? Or are you just wanting to be able to play everything in HD? Because a PC running an Intel or Ryzen chip like what you got listed is your only bet. With the latter, all you need are the OG systems themselves, and a willingness to figure out how to homebrew them, convert their video signals to HD, and everything else in between, which is easier to do nowadays compared to how it used to be thanks to various devices, like ODEs for the GC, Saturn, DC, PS1, and the ability to run games off of an OG Xbox HDD. To play these games in HD, you have options like the RetroTINK to go and upscale these old games to TVs and to convert their video signals to an HDMI connection. You might have to be willing to invest in some switchers and a bunch of cables if you want to do this, tho. And have a bunch of controllers, memory cards, a bunch of tools to disassemble old consoles that only work with those old systems specifically, etc..

All of this is gonna require some introspection and research on your part. I can't make that decision for you. I would strongly encourage you to grab your favorite drink, play some chill music playlist, open a bunch of tabs on your current PC, and do some research on the more demanding emulators and what the requirements are to run those games. Or, if you decide to just rig a bunch of old systems and have a retro setup of sorts to have a "it just works" solution like what you seem to imply you really want, get a RetroTINK, a switcher, and see what else one should do if they want to get the most out of those systems. In the case of the OGXbox, PS3, Xbox 360, PS2, etc., just get the original systems themselves, (tho avoid the Super Slim PS3s, as I've heard their homebrew options are the most limited out of the three PS3 models. I'd say the regular Slim is the best one tho) as they're easy to modify even nowadays, and we even have forums for those who still use those systems to this day here on GBATemp!

Best of luck, ital!

 

[Jayro]

There are finally some good Ryzen APUs out now and NUC-sized computers to house them. ETA Prime makes TONS of videos on these with full specs and emulation testing. He likes to test known games that normally struggle the most on certain emulators, so you'll have a good idea of the hardware limitations.

Here's one of my favorites:


And another killer one: