Emu Boxee

OK - I want appologize ahead of time if this is the wrong spot for this.

having said that ...

I wanted to get some opinions on this, and the more I get the better.

I want to build an Emulator Box - and while I know this is hardly an origonal idea, it is one that I have been toying with for a while

I know that you can mod an oldschool Xbox (and I actually have one that is softmodded) but I am kinda picky about my emulators and the features that they have - for example: the NES emulator on my Xbox has the ability to increase the FPS super fast by pulling the right trigger, but for some odd reason (odd in my opinion anyway) it does not have the ability to go super slow by pulling the left trigger. I have checked the options and forums and have found nothing that can add this ability either.

Anyway, I was wanting to get everyones opinion on how to go about this:

I want to be able to emulate just about everything I can find between the old pong machine all the way up to old school xbox PS1 and PS2.

-I was thinking about using Linux as my OS. I know that Linux support for emulators is not as vast as Windows but I also feel that Linux would be cleaner somehow. Also, getting ahold of a 64 bit copy of W7 might prove to be somewhat difficult
-I was thinking about going AMD (always been a fan). I was thinking about going tri-core, but do ya'll think I am going to need quad core?
-Video card - I am pretty sure that something with some power would be a good idea especially when it comes to the newer systems like xbox and ps1 / ps2
-Motherboard - not real sure on this one.
-Ram - How much do you guys think? I was thinking 4 gigs would be sufficient but i dunno
-Power supply - I know has to do with how much the components are pulling, and I can find this out with a watt calculator freely available on new egg
The case and other periferals - These I can probably get

So the short version of my probably unnecesarily LONG email is: please give me your opinions on how to get this done in the best possible fashion - and, like any good American I would like to get as much as I can for as little as possible. If I can keep it under 500 that would be great - if I can get it done for as little as around 400 that would be teh awesomeness

Thanks in advance you guys.

You won't need any kind of significant spec for everything up to and including PS1. If you're going to be emulating PS2 you want a fast multi-cored processor, a good mid range graphics card, and at least 4Gb of Ram.
Use Windows. Most emulators and other emulation software are designed specifically to run on windows, running on anything else limits the number of different system emulators you have available to use, and can be a nightmare jumping through hoops trying to get everything working, often involving emulating windows on the host OS then running the console emulator, via the emulated windows install.....effectively you gain nothing by running on Linux or anything else, quite the opposite.
For the record there are still no original X-Box emulators that run commercial games well enough to play them.

Find a Front-End. There are loads of decent front-ends out there to try. Setting up your emulators with a decent multi-emulator front-end transforms the experience and is well worth the time and effort.

As an example.

Some pics of my current setup using the Mamewah front-end. All controlled using a couple of PS2 dualshocks. The screenshots on the game lists are all actually little avi video's showing the game in play. Shoulder buttons switch the game lists from system to system and the start button launches the selected game. The PC running it is an Athlon 64 7550, 2Gb of Ram, Geforce8600, running on WindowsXP. It runs everything up to and including PS1 without any problems at all. You should be able to buy a system of similar spec for more or less ?100. You can buy a system powerful enough for PS2 emulation for well under ?500.









Left the rest as URL's rather than making the post too long.

http://img45.imageshack.us/img45/487/dsc0237hc4.jpg

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Trucker, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and my current new best friend.

Awesome setup, looks really good.

Another question: what about systems like the Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Game Cube, and Mame - could it run those as well? I know you said up to and including PS1 but I wasnt sure if you were including those systems.

Also, thank you for such a quick reply.

Wow Trucker, your setup is a thing of beauty! I hope to be able to set up something like that someday.

kraihavok said:

Trucker, you are a gentleman and a scholar, and my current new best friend.

Awesome setup, looks really good.

Another question: what about systems like the Sega Saturn, Sega Dreamcast, Game Cube, and Mame - could it run those as well? I know you said up to and including PS1 but I wasnt sure if you were including those systems.

Also, thank you for such a quick reply.

Click to expand...

Saturn and DC emulation are still not brilliant TBH. My current system will run SSF (Saturn Emu) well enough but the emulation simply isn't up to scratch. It ran fine with NullDC (DC emulator) when I was messing about with it, but the storage constraints for loads of ISO's for disk based systems means I currently only have PS1, MegaCD, and TurboGrafX CD emulators running on it. I haven't tried Dolphin (GC emu) with it, but it runs everything that works in Mame with no issues at all. Just using 64 bit windows with a 64 bit Mame build can give up to 30% faster performance with mame.

If you're interested in running emulators for more recent systems like the PS2 and GC I would recommend going with a higher spec. Fast Intel Dual Core, as much Ram as you can afford and a reasonably decent graphics card. Still very affordable.

Mupen64 Man said:

Wow Trucker, your setup is a thing of beauty! I hope to be able to set up something like that someday.

Click to expand...

If you already have a PC its very easy to do. Mamewah has a pretty steep learning curve but gives great results when you get the hang of its config file system. However there are loads of great Multi-emulator FE's out there to try, some of which are simplicity itself to set up and configure. Its well worth the time and effort if you spend any amount of time playing games via emulators.

If you decide to have a go at it and need any help getting set up then feel free to contact me here or for a quicker response, over at the Retrogamer Magazine forums (same username) where I moderate.

Right now I am still in Job Corps Academy and if you check my profile you will see that I haven't changed my setup in years. When I get a new computer I will be sure to ask you, thanks.

I do the same thing FT does, I run it from a computer to my big screen. I dont agree that DC is all that bad? but I do about saturn. Of course for my I use my bliss-box . I hide it in the cabinet under the tv. Its fun to mess with friends that dont know... Hey you have an atri still? Then to go off and come back in to the room and now its a n64. Then its "dude how many console you got in there?"

I toyed with the arcade cab a bit, but I really like the computer to tv out. I dont use a front end all decked out out like that, just QuickPlay. Thou I'm biased, as I took over development on QP. If you like that type of front end, check out hyper spin.

Testing out the new bliss-box PSX guitar code with the pcsx emulator.

What would be really cool though is if I could get an AV input splitter so that I could connect all my systems at once, and all I would need to do is switch the feed to the console I want, but of course if I were to do that I would have to open up the cabinet each time I wanted to change cartridges/CD's, but it would be funny for someone to see all my systems lined up.

Hey I did that in 92. I had snes, nes, atari, sega, and a few more.

Haha! Thats pretty awesome, you're just rocking out. How is the response time for the guitar on the emulator? Is there any lag?

Well it took a bit to get it there. The response from guitar to computer is not detectable. I think its on the order for 300us but the game took some doing. I had to change a few settings and add some hacks. I was never satisfied till I got my new AMD Phenom™ II X2 Black. Most GH games did not emulate well but the ones that did I got very playable. I beat slayer rain of blood so it passed the test ;p