I'm building a dedicated emulation PC

[isiolia]

As far as ps2 and Wii emulation, both are pretty good as long as you have a gaming quality PC. I have a pretty good setup and seeing GC and PS2 ran at 1080p with anti-aliasing turn up all the way along with the various other filters you can add make those games look so good you won't believe your eyes. LoZ: Twilight Princess looks stunning. I never thought that game could look that good. But, like has been mentioned before, some game's dont run and other's have some problems. But, the emulator are constantly being tweaked and upgraded so they will get better over time.

Really may depend on style of game too as to whether performance issues are a problem. I've only played around briefly with PS2 emulation, but on my gaming PC (i7 950, HD6870, 18GB RAM, etc) it didn't have parity with a PS2 on stuff like Gran Turismo 3. Even at native resolution, it still slowed down and had massive audio problems.

There's a ton of potential there though, as 3D PS2 games (at least) can be made to look much, much better than they do on an actual system.

[marlowe221]

Here is the thing regarding MAME and the fight sticks. I'm not 100% sure about even running the emulator. I have tried in the past and have had such a hard time with it. I don't know if it's the fact that I just don't know what I'm doing or if it's really that tough of an emulator, but I can never get more than a couple games to work. I would love for someone to point me towards a MAME for Dummies type tutorial because I need it.

http://www.racketboy.com/retro/emulatio ... me32mameui

Racketboy to the rescue!!

[Frag Mortuus]

Here is the thing regarding MAME and the fight sticks. I'm not 100% sure about even running the emulator. I have tried in the past and have had such a hard time with it. I don't know if it's the fact that I just don't know what I'm doing or if it's really that tough of an emulator, but I can never get more than a couple games to work. I would love for someone to point me towards a MAME for Dummies type tutorial because I need it.

http://www.racketboy.com/retro/emulatio ... me32mameui

Racketboy to the rescue!!

AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Frag Mortuus]

Well, I have decided to take some advice on here and go with XBMC for my dedicated front end as opposed to Hyperspin. The reason being is that XBMC is far more versatile. It can handle all types of media. Music, Movies, Shows, Games, Pictures, and it can stream from Hulu, Netflix and other various internet sites. Hyperspin is a great front end for games. But, I like the idea of one program controlling it all.

Also, I have decided to got with an AMD Trinity APU, specifically the 5800K. It is a quad core 3.8ghz CPU with a 7660GPU built in. I looked at the bench marks and it will be able to run everything from Wii/PS2/GC and earlier with no problems. I'm also going Mini-ITX motherboard, with a Mini-ITX desktop case. The one I'm looking at measures in at 8.5" x 10" x 12". The motherboard I'm wanting isn't released yet, but should be by the beginning of the year. It is an MSI board with built in Wifi and Bluetooth 3.0. It looks like it's designed with enthusiasts in mind. The built in BT makes using a Wii-remote and PS3 controller easier, lol.

The best part of this is that the price is only going to set me back about $300. The APU is $129, the case is $35, the board is going to be about $90 and 8GB of RAM is gong to be about $45. I have a small HDD that is only about 160GB that I will use for now. I'm pretty stoked that I have nailed down my specs.

I was originally going to use a PC a friend gave me, but the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to make something that would integrate into my entertainment center easily and I wanted the smallest foot print I could make.

[Nyukki]

Congrats! Have fun setting up your HTPC!

I had a look at the Rom Collection Browser in XBMC this weekend and it is really awesome, love how you can sort by Genre, year etc. quickly and having the game info on hand is very useful.

Not sure if other users have had this problem, but when I was setting up my rom lists in RCB, the downloads for the artwork and game info took forever. Also, everytime RCB ran into a rom it could not create an artwork file for (which happened all the time) it would stop downloading until I clicked the cancel button, meaning I couldn't just let it do its thing and go do something else. After about 6 hours it had downloaded about 60% of my NES list, when I accidentally hit return twice (once to cancel "could not create artwork" and once by accident to cancel compiling the list), so I gave up. It might just be that the downloads are really slow where I am and will be better in the States.

Would be great if all the artwork and game info were available in a seperate torrent so that you can get it all at once and add it manually.

[pvt_awol]

^

Man, I've been out of it for a while. I didn't know XBMC had dedicated ROM plugins and support. I've just always been doing things the manual "old fashioned" way. I'm going to have to check this out.


Also Frag Mortuus, good choice on the APU. That will be an emulation beast for cheap for you. One thing to note though, the Wii and PS2 emulation "probably" isn't going to be super amazing with the built in GPU, due to how it works. However, keep in mind that that particular APU will work in Crossfire mode with a dedicated Radeon GPU. So think about that before you buy the motherboard. In the future, you may want to add in a discreet graphics card and run Crossfire, but if you don't plan ahead, you'll be buying a new motherboard too. Just something to think about.


Oh yes, and as someone said in an earlier post, once you've played Wii and GC games in 1080p with full AA, you'll wonder why Nintendo hasn't MADE this happen on a console. It really is that GOOD. I was so excited thinking that the WiiU was going to do this for backward compatibility, but sadly it isn't true. These games could honestly compete with the best that Sony and M$ have to offer, if only they could look as good as Dolphin makes them look on a dedicated machine. Oh well. Maybe next cycle? LOL.