Anyone make a dedicated emulation desktop?

My side job is flipping PCs and I've decided to try to cobble together my least wanted hardware into a computer running Lakka (basically RetroPie for x86). It would a basic build for sticking in the entertainment center and hooking up ab XBox controller. I unearthed an old Dell with 2GB of RAM and installed a Radeon 5450, mainly for the HDMI output. As for the CPU: it's a 64-bit Pentium 4. I have the option of replacing it with a much faster (but only 32-bit) P4. My question is whether the trade-off is worth it just for emulation. More Hertz or more bits? I also have a Core 2 Duo which I'd rather not waste on this machine but if it CONSIDERABLY widens my options I might consider it.

My experience with emulation is that there's quite a few good emulators for 2D consoles/PCs (Commodore 64, NES, Genesis, SNES, Amiga), but for 3D ones (where upping a graphics card might help more) its more spotty. N64 emulators can be a pain and often are a little buggy. PS1 emulators are less buggy. But I hear the Dolphin emulator for GameCube is pretty good (but requires a decent set up).

On a side note, the Xbox 360 controller d-pad drove me crazy. I had to get a 3rd party controller to play Mortal Kombat, so I could get a d-pad I liked. The Xbox One d-pad is nice, but I hear they are reverting back to the 360 d-pad for their "series x".

@Bucket I would go the thin client route (The linked site has a ton of info on them)

Reasons why:

• They are cheap. Honestly, If you want to pay for them, you can easily settle for 10-30 bucks and you get a fully functional system with 2 GB RAM easily. Sometimes you can get them for free aswell when companies discard them, as most think its a useless machine - Its not.
• They are omnipresent, especially the HP ones.
• They are low powered machines as compared to your current desktop rig. 20 watts max power consumption is to be expected.
• Most of the time you can install a full fat Windows on them provided they have a BIOS (Pretty much all HP/Dell's have these.)
• Most of them have a SATA connection, so you can hoist a HDD in them. Some even have PCIE connectors to hold a seperate GPU (Look at the Plus versions of HP clients for those most of the time.
• They are reasonably powerful. Your current rig now includes a Radeon HD 5450 - Starting from HP T520 and T610, you get Radeon HD 6320 and higher which are slightly less in performance to the HD 5450 (As they are integrated) but they consume even less.

Reasons why not:

• They do come with little storage space of their own through a DOM (basically a small SSD). If you are going to install locally, you will need more space.
• You need to look carefully which models are out there. Quite a few models rely on VIA processors and their Chrome IGP's which might be less suitable in terms of compatibility for certain emulation tasks. A few also use Intel processors. If you are adamant on 3D gaming, look for any TC's with AMD hardware - Usually AMD works better in my experience for emulation.
• Look for TC's with AMD hardware - HP, i keep on saying it, uses AMD hardware almost exclusively and thus differs from most other TC manufacturers who use VIA hardware (With Unichrome or Chrome9 GPU's...)

I use quite a few emulators on my laptop, stuff like MAME, Project 64, Fusion, etc. My laptop has 8GB of RAM with a dual-core Pentium in it, and it handles most games well but it's not too fond of polygonal-based games but it can handle stuff like Splinter Cell, GTA III, and recently I've been replaying a game called XIII which runs well enough. The laptop's visual capability is not exactly great although it can run HD movies without stuttering.

Your current set up should be okay for older games but if you're wanting to emulate from PS2/Xbox/GameCube era then you might want to upgrade.

My question was if 64-bit is a good tradeoff for single-core performance. I'm not sure which emulators make more use of.

1 hour ago, Bucket said:

My question was if 64-bit is a good tradeoff for single-core performance. I'm not sure which emulators make more use of.

In that case: 64 bit-builds rely on more RAM to get their performance out of it, so that's how they improve upon it.

Besides that, you would want to discard your power sapping P4 for something that is a lot smaller, equal parts of cheap, and has way better emulation support. Which is why i suggested the Thin Client route as those things are ideal for what you want to do. :)

What I want to do is make a cheap junky emu PC so I can sell it.

14 hours ago, Redneckerz said:

@Bucket I would go the thin client route (The linked site has a ton of info on them)

Recently got one of these myself and it's working out really nicely for me. The site you've linked is a very useful resource and I consulted it frequently when picking one out to buy. In particular I made sure to find one with a PCI expansion slot - it's possible to get brand new PCI sound cards from eBay for only $5, including ones with the ESS Solo-1 chipset which are SoundBlaster compatible and should work nicely for DOS gaming. In total everything has cost me around $30 which I think is amazing.

I'm currently waiting for my sound card to arrive but I've already had a lot of fun and I have a Mastodon thread where I've been posting updates.

11 hours ago, Bucket said:

What I want to do is make a cheap junky emu PC so I can sell it.

Ah, now i see. Using your spare parts to generate a cheap build. Noted!

9 hours ago, fraggle said:

Recently got one of these myself and it's working out really nicely for me. The site you've linked is a very useful resource and I consulted it frequently when picking one out to buy. In particular I made sure to find one with a PCI expansion slot - it's possible to get brand new PCI sound cards from eBay for only $5, including ones with the ESS Solo-1 chipset which are SoundBlaster compatible and should work nicely for DOS gaming. In total everything has cost me around $30 which I think is amazing.

 

I'm currently waiting for my sound card to arrive but I've already had a lot of fun and I have a Mastodon thread where I've been posting updates.

The older ones are slightly larger and Phil's Computer Lab has had a build where he added a Voodoo card. Size is however definitely one small pickle though.

Your SIS 550 is indeed a curious one, it also has integrated Ultra AGP Graphics, but its difficult to find out if it is a Mirage (Which is a 3D chip) or not. Some more info regarding your CPU can be found here.

So the decision was made for me. Whether the PC refused to load the 32-bit kernel or the 32-bit CPU refused to work, makes no difference, but in the end I have to use the Pentium 4 521. One of the few x64 P4s out there, so it's interesting to work with. Lakka runs well enough on this machine for 8- and 16-bit games. It's also nice that I can dump my slowest RAM and smallest SATA drive in this thing.

Next comes the GPU; I only have three low-profile cards on hand. The Radeon 5450 works great, allows for some shaders, but I might have another use for it. I'd much rather dump my GeForce 7300LE in here if I could get away with it. On the other end of the spectrum I've got a GeForce GT720 that would be... adequate for Vulkan. I wonder, though, if it would actually be wasted potential in this machine. Given that it's a PCIe x4 card, and the PCIe lane in this box is already outdated, I'm thinking nah.

I have a machine I built from spare parts in my living room for emulation and Steam Link for playing Duck Game and a few others when friends visit:

- AMD Athlon X4 860k stock with some $50 MSI motherboard.

- 8GB DDR3 Patriot RAM I got for $15.

- GeForce 750ti bought used on eBay for $30.

Along with pre-PS1 stuff, this rig handles Dolphin, PCSX2 and ReDream no problem. I haven't tested PS2 at 1080p yet, but it handles the other two no problem. The only issue is that I put this all in a giant ATX case (it's the only thing I had laying around at the time) and it takes up a ton of room next to my entertainment center. I would suggest a thin client like mentioned earlier if you want something more compact but you'll be limited to pretty much anything PS1 and earlier.

Another option soon (hopefully) will be a Raspberry Pi 4. There isn't anything stable for it yet, but once RetroPie releases an image for it that will probably be the next best thing. A couple groups I follow have shown some demo stuff of Dreamcast and Gamecube games running on a Pi4 with almost no slowdown.

The Pi4 sounds like dead-end technology to me. It's been known to overheat and at that point, if you need that kind of processing power just use a mini PC.

So apparently there is an X11 build for Lakka that should support older GPUs (hopefully like my 7300LE). The link is broken and it doesn't seem to exist in their directory any more. I'll try the 32-bit version again, this time with a working CPU, to see if I can get away with the slower hardware. I mean, even though a lot of emulators take advantage of OpenGL, they're still highly CPU-driven, right? Would a 5450 make or break this computer? I *guess* having HDMI input would be a huge selling point... but a lot of TVs also support VGA.