My friend’s kid has recently developed an interest in video games, but he doesn’t currently have the budget to get her a console or gaming PC, so he’s been asking to borrow one of my old consoles.
I was thinking instead that I might throw him together a little emulation machine, either out of a raspberry pi or a mini PC. It’s probably been about 10 years since I last went down this particular rabbit hole and built myself a retropie, so I’m not too sure what the current state of things looks like, so I wanted to see what kind of hardware people would recommend these days
I remember my raspberry pi struggling to handle N64 games, not sure if that situation has improved much since then, but that has me leaning towards a mini PC, but of course PC hardware prices have gone nuts this year (not that raspberry pis are much better these days)
So just trying to figure out what the best bang for my buck would be or what specs I should be looking for in a computer. Ideally I’m hoping for him to be able to emulate everything up to about Wii/PS2/Xbox, and ideally not spend much over about $200 (plus the cost of some controllers and such for them)
Not opposed to building a PC for the purpose, I do have an older graphics card kicking around I could throw in it, I want to say it’s a GTX 980 that I think should be more than enough for these needs, but no other spare hardware at the moment.
i suspect that a pc is going to give you more mileage, but at the same time, kids like the newest shiny thing so it’s possible that they might not appreciate your efforts or dedicating needful hardware to it.
Definitely valid. Luckily I think she’s still young enough that pretty much anything with some buttons she can push to make something happen on the screen is going to keep her entertained
And he’s not much of a gamer himself so I figure something is better than nothing
And he’s not much of a gamer himself so I figure something is better than nothing
this might make it worthwhile.
i was speaking from experience earlier when i told you that they might not appreciate the expense on effort and other resources. i did something similar for my nephews many years ago – dropping lots of time and hardware on it – and they didn’t bother to with it because it wasn’t the latest and greatest shiney new console from sony or nintendo.
i built my friend a retropie out of an old desktop pc laying around. plays to about gamecube with little issue.
think i had to just install regular ubuntu, then run some retropie scripts. this was maybe two years ago. mostly works fine but do some maintenence about once a year.
also great to recycle old hardware
