Emulation with old PC's help

[RBT]

Being a Ubuntu user I have never given much thought to Emulation but with my Dad upgrading his PC a few months ago I have been left with his old PC and its collecting dust.

IBM Thinkcentre SFF
Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz
2gb RAM
Built-in Intel extreme graphics and sounds
Windows XP Pro

I would love to be able to Emulate 16bit or older systems, is it possible with a PC this old?
Would it be worth upgrading the graphics card? Any help would be most appreciated because I don't have clue.

[t0yrobo]

You shouldn't have any problems with most emulators on that machine. Playstation could be a little rough, but 16bit stuff and mame should be just fine.

[RBT]

That's good to know, I'm more of a 2D kinda guy so I never even gave n64 or newer consoles a thought when it came to emulation.

[Anayo]

I used to play 16-bit emulators on a PC half as powerful as that one. It'll work.

[Krooner]

Playstation will be nowhere near rough! I run it perfectly on a 1.2GHZ celron with 1GB ram. Filter might slw stuff down but I don't use them anyway.

[Hatta]

I run 16 bit and earlier emulators on an 1.13ghz IBM T23 laptop with very few complaints. I can't run newer emulators like bsnes, or nintendulator, but zsnes and fce still work great.

Since you're a Ubuntu user, I'll mention that I do it on Linux. There are lots of emulators available on Ubuntu, you should give them a look. You will like Mednafen, it should be in the repository. It does NES, GBA, PCE(CD), WonderSwan and Lynx IIRC. Kegs is available on Linux now for Genesis, and both Zsnes and bsnes are good for SNES.

All of the major sytems are well emulated on Linux. We do lose some edge cases, like the unix version of UAE hasn't been updated in a few years for instance. And there's no Final Burn Alpha. But for the most part you can do pretty well under Linux, and it's a lot more fun than using Windows.

Also, upgrading the graphics card won't do much for retro games. The only openGL functions they usually use are scaling, and possibly filtering. Those are two of the simplest things for a video card to do, so even the shittiest card like my old onboard S3 on the T23 can do it. Emulators are almost always CPU limited.

[thekorean12]

That will run 32bit just as well as 16bit emulation. You're good to go.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

Trust me man, a P4 at that speed with as much ram as you've got in it will run every single thing you'll throw at it. Common misconception is that the P4 is a bottlenecked processor from hell, but in all reality when it comes to sheer number crunching power it's still a damn good processor.

For example my family's 2.49ghz P4 HP Pavilion desktop from 2002 with zero upgrades, still running XP home, the original onboard intel extreme graphics and only 512 Mb RAM can run Saturn, PS1, N64 and everything else I can throw at it like a champ without a hint of slowdown.

Getting a newer graphics card for it would actually be a nice upgrade to make web browsing and other day to day usage a lot sppeedier, but make sure to check what type of expansion slots it has. If it's just standard PCI then you can get a card for it that's a generation behind the current crop of cards for a pretty reasonable price and see a decent boost in performance over what you had before. If it has PCI express, AGP or a variant of either your options open up a lot more and you can buy much more recent or current cards at better prices.

If you decide to upgrade keep in mind that you'll probably have to buy low profile as Think Centers come in those thin desktop cases, that is unless you have one of the Think Center towers in which case you should have a myriad of upgrade options at your fingertips at quite affordable prices.

[RBT]

Thanks for all the advice guys, I really appreciate it. I will have to give some of the 32 Bit era consoles a go.

[Dos]

I'd use MS Dos, or Freedos for it, it boots up a lot faster that way and will give you more memory for emulation, and you could easily throw a Gui in like Opengem or Ozone.