Ultimate emulation box for living room TV?

[Windfish]

I have been adamant in preferring physical media, until recently. I have come to appreciate the improvements that emulators can make on my favorite video-games. Sure, there are issues with accuracy and latency, but strides are being regularly made.

One thing I will not budge on, however, is playing my games in a living room set up. So I have been on a quest to find or build an emulation box for my TV that is powerful enough to perfectly emulate games up to Wii/PS2/Xbox/GC. And perhaps I could add video-streaming from Hulu, Netflix, and all the rest. Does such a thing exist?

My first attempt at a solution was the Nvidia Shield TV. It has a snappy, TV-optimized OS. There is no boot-time, and it is plug-and-play. And it can run emulators! The problem is that it cannot run certain emulators for certain systems very well. Dolphin, for example, runs quite poorly on the thing.

Before I make another expensive mistake, I thought I would seek this community's advice. What are some great solutions? What is the ultimate emulation box for the living room TV?

What about the Intel Nucs?

[Custardo]

Just use a pc with a decent video card. Don't bother with a fancy front end because they all navigate slower then the regular desktop, whatever OS you choose. A NUC will be ok, but a desktop PC is more flexible.

[nmalinoski]

My concern with a NUC would be lack of power and compatibility from the GPU, and the cost of the hardware. Intel's integrated GPUs have never really been designed for heavy workloads (at least from what I've seen); there's absolutely no room in a NUC to shove in a decent, discrete GPU. On top of that, these things cost hundreds of dollars for something that's really only going to be good for productivity, or perhaps a handful of virtual machines, and I don't think they can't be upgraded with newer motherboards or processors.

A DIY Mini-ITX system (or even an off-the-shelf SFF gaming PC) is going to be a bit bulkier, but it'll have a PCI-e slot for a full-size GPU, it'll allow for piecemeal part upgrades, and you'll get a lot more performance for your money versus a NUC.

[Windfish]

Just use a pc with a decent video card. Don't bother with a fancy front end because they all navigate slower then the regular desktop, whatever OS you choose. A NUC will be ok, but a desktop PC is more flexible.

You make a good point, but a fancy front-end is important to me. A lot of time, money, and effort, is spent trying to make living room setups beautiful and effortless. I would hope there's an emulator front-end that's acceptable.

[ldeveraux]

I use this NUC and it's well powered enough! If you're savvy, you can get one complete for <200 on Fleabay.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... 6cayh.html

[Windfish]

I use this NUC and it's well powered enough! If you're savvy, you can get one complete for <200 on Fleabay.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... 6cayh.html

Can you elaborate on your setup? Do you use a front-end, up to what system can you emulate? Is it a hassle to boot-up and stuff?

[moltomolto]

PC with premium Launchbox is your best bet. I've messed around with a few frontends and this is the best IMO.

[Gara]

What you're describing is a gaming PC. Those same gaming builds make the best HTPC and emulator boxes. Buy a tower/enclosure that would look good in your living room and build away. You should be basing your search on the software side rather than hardware. There are some fancy front ends out there.

[Windfish]

What you're describing is a gaming PC. Those same gaming builds make the best HTPC and emulator boxes. Buy a tower/enclosure that would look good in your living room and build away. You should be basing your search on the software side rather than hardware. There are some fancy front ends out there.

Increasingly, I am seeing that a gaming PC is the way to go. I am more open to a full-on tower enclosure, but before I resort to that, wouldn't a high-end NUC suffice?

[nmalinoski]

What you're describing is a gaming PC. Those same gaming builds make the best HTPC and emulator boxes. Buy a tower/enclosure that would look good in your living room and build away. You should be basing your search on the software side rather than hardware. There are some fancy front ends out there.

Increasingly, I am seeing that a gaming PC is the way to go. I am more open to a full-on tower enclosure, but before I resort to that, wouldn't a high-end NUC suffice?

If nothing has changed in the past few years (and I'm a bit biased here), Intel's integrated GPUs generally only provide the absolute minimum you need to comfortably run productivity software, and are not geared towards gaming or high-end performance (which is what you'd need).

[Xyga]

A refurbished Dell Optiplex (SSF size format) is still quite compact and can fit a low profile discrete GPU.
Some of those feature a quad core 3+GHz CPU and W7, quite good ideal for old systems emulation.

But for the PS2/Wii/GC ? I'm not sure...with the best choice of CPU and the most powerful low profile GPU you can find (750Ti maybe?) that might do, though not at max upscale output nor with the very latest shader engine improvements.

For more juice I too would go for a new desktop as suggested, with a CPU like the i3-9100F (great performance for 100 bucks) and a cheap mobo that can fit W7 like mentioned in that article;
http://www.anandtech.com/show/13201/int ... ke-support
(didn't try myself so take with a grain of salt, but the manufacturers indeed seem to carry the required drivers for W7, just make sure)
Because fuck W10, really, for emulators - save maybe some of the laest cutting edge emu stuff - you want 7 period.
And whatever GPU you want.

[ldeveraux]

I use this NUC and it's well powered enough! If you're savvy, you can get one complete for <200 on Fleabay.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... 6cayh.html

Can you elaborate on your setup? Do you use a front-end, up to what system can you emulate? Is it a hassle to boot-up and stuff?

I didn't say I use it as a gaming PC, just said that I use it It's in my basement as a remote access point and it's great. I guess you could use it as a gaming PC, it's the perfect size, silent, semi-powerful, has HDMI out. Check it!

[thebigcheese]

My emulation experience is kinda limited, but I will say that if you go the PC route (as opposed to a Mister, which probably wouldn't work very well for PS2 and the like anyway), I recommend going with an Nvidia GPU. Not because I am a fanboy or anything, but because certain filters and enhancements, at least in PS1 emulation, seem to only work with Nvidia GPUs. If you're a purest and want to leave things looking exactly like they did back in the day, then not a big issue, but playing PS1 with 32-bit color and dithering turned off is really quite fantastic and doesn't seem to be possible with AMD. Having said that, that's about the only use case where it really matters, so YMMV.

[donluca]

Unless you *REALLY* need to emulate modern consoles like the gamecube and such, a 30$ Playstation Classic with retroarch is the way to go.

You already have everything ready, just need half an hour for the initial setup, fill a USB Pen drive with ROMs and you're good to go.

Anything more than this, and it gets infinitely more complicated (and expensive).

This is the path I've been walking down to for my casual emulation station and it really can't get better than this.

[ldeveraux]

Unless you *REALLY* need to emulate modern consoles like the gamecube and such, a 30$ Playstation Classic with retroarch is the way to go.

You already have everything ready, just need half an hour for the initial setup, fill a USB Pen drive with ROMs and you're good to go.

Anything more than this, and it gets infinitely more complicated (and expensive).

This is the path I've been walking down to for my casual emulation station and it really can't get better than this.

This is Shmups though, anyone here should be willing to put in the work I think OP can find a happy medium between the Playstation and a full out PC. The RPi 4 was just released, I'm going to run some RetroPie on that!

[vol.2]

Unless you *REALLY* need to emulate modern consoles like the gamecube and such, a 30$ Playstation Classic with retroarch is the way to go.

You already have everything ready, just need half an hour for the initial setup, fill a USB Pen drive with ROMs and you're good to go.

Anything more than this, and it gets infinitely more complicated (and expensive).

This is the path I've been walking down to for my casual emulation station and it really can't get better than this.

This is Shmups though, anyone here should be willing to put in the work I think OP can find a happy medium between the Playstation and a full out PC. The RPi 4 was just released, I'm going to run some RetroPie on that!

From what I understood, retropie isn't running on the pi 4b yet. I'm not 100% on the details, but I know the 4 is being released with a preview version of debian on it, and it's probable that retropie will need updating for that.

Also, I seriously doubt it's going to reach PS2 heights of performance as OP stated they are looking for.

So far, the only thing I can see fitting OPs request is a mini itx machine with an Nvidia gpu.

[orange808]

Get a real tower that's absolutely decked out if you want "ultimate".

Install Kodi or use the Steam big picture mode to provide a couch friendly interface.

You will probably also want to write some custom scripts to keep things moving along. AutoHotKey makes that fairly easy to do.