Lordmonkus

Well now you're asking me to predict the future in whether or not some of those emulators will make the shift towards more accuracy. They may or may not, they may end up dying off and new more accurate emulators take their place like ZSnes and Higan.

So if you know the answer why are you asking me ?

Nope.

If your PC currently runs those emulators and LB perfectly fine then in all likelihood you will never have to upgrade it.

That all depends on the MB and the bios already on it but generally speaking you wont see any performance games. It may in some rare cases increase stability if you install a new piece of hardware that for some strange reason has an incompatibility issue and a bios update can fix that. PC shops would do it because they can easily do it and it's low risk to them and eliminates any potential incompatibilities at the time of building a PC. The real risk comes usually from noobs flashing the incorrect bios they downloaded because they got the MB model wrong in the downloader. Updating MB bios is difficult or super high risk but there is some and people not used to doing it are inherently more prone to messing it up.

I tend to agree with the first statement, only update the MB bios only if you need to for the exact reason stated, it can brick your MB if something goes horribly wrong. That isn't to say it's difficult or super risky but it is far more risky than updating a simple driver. Though some new MBs do support a roll back to a stock bios.

Bios go in the \Retroarch\System folder, only arcade games have their bios in with the games files.

That depends on when you buy and how much you spend on it. There will always be a range of hardware for different budgets and the low end for the foreseeable future won't be really good for 4K gaming. But who knows what's to come in say 2 years time, by then Nvidia will most likely have another new generation of hardware. I agree with you, if your hardware is capable of doing a task that you need then why not use it. I have several PCs for different things, I just built a brand new high end gaming rig for my Windows gaming, I moved my old PC over to be my new HTPC and my old HTPC got put out in the back room for now until I find a need for it. I even have an old ass laptop sitting beside me running Linux though I rarely actually use it for anything other than tinkering. lol

Basically buy new hardware when you cannot run the software you want to run at the speeds that you want. Like if a new game comes out that you want to play but your current PC will not run it sufficiently fast enough with the graphics settings you want then you need to look at upgrading your hardware. But if everything you use your computer for is doing it in a way that meets your standards then stay with what you have. This is pretty much true.

As hardware gets older it gets cheaper. Generally speaking you will spend approximately the same amount of money for a new system for relatively equal performance compared to high end games of the time. This has always been the way PC hardware has been.

No, it's not better than what you got but it's actually not too far off of your system, especially if you threw a dedicated graphics card in the system I linked. The one I linked doesn't have a dedicated GPU but the 2200G is an APU which means it has a GPU built into the CPU and is pretty good for how cheap it is, but that would add another 100-200$ on to the price depending on what card was added in.

Correct.

I mean it's possible there is something else going on to cause the issue but that hardware is so old that would be my first place to look at. You could easily build a new system for under 500$ USD that would completely destroy the one you got and run your emulators better. https://pcpartpicker.com/list/vpRdMZ

It's probably just not fast enough to move data in and out of it. Also the fact that his CPU is from 2007 and running Windows 10 on this hardware doesn't help at all. He's basically overloading the hardware.

DDR3 is fine for a little while yet but any new systems nowadays will use DDR4. The new Intel and AMD CPUs both require motherboards that require DDR4, DD3 is completely incompatible with the new hardware.

He said it was DDR2 though which is extremely old at this point, current systems are now using DDR4 and DDR3 was the norm for the past like 10 years.

So 6 Gigs of DDR2 ram ? If so then that is probably your problem right there in running out of memory with LB.

lol it's all good, you started the thread with a valid question.

You said the HW core was running slow but the non hardware one won't load your games which is very strange. Why would it be trying to run at a different refresh rate >

I don't know, maybe for laptop users wishing to conserve battery life. No idea, I can't remember ever running a PC not in High Performance profile. It won't shorten the lifespan of your PC. It's not like over clocking at all. It won't eat any extra resources. It will probably draw some more electricity but it's minimal and you will likely never notice it unless you are running everything off of solar powered charged batteries and they don't last as long. Like I said, I have never run a PC not in High Performance mode.

If you have problems with Launchbox Next and wish to go back you can check your Updates folder for an older installer and reinstall that but the old LB is no longer being developed and you will have to stick with the old version without updates. If you don't have any of the older versions email support and they will get you a download link for an older build. Launchbox Next has been pretty thoroughly tested and very few people have had any issues such as the ones you are describing. Launchbox Next in fact runs better for pretty much everyone and because of the way it is coded it makes the future features to come possible.

Power options should always be set to the Maximum Performance profile anyways. When I say "you don't need any tweak" I meant you don't need any tweaks to your system specifically to make Launchbox perform better but there is always tweaks to make to your system based on your own needs. I just got a new high end PC over the weekend and I have spent the last few days tweaking it to my liking and the way I want it. You will just have to do the same for your personal preference

What you are saying isn't wrong but again this has nothing to do specifically with installer vs zip and I am repeating what I have already stated, it just all depends, there is no definitive "one is better than the other".

What you are describing is strange because if they work with the HW version of the Mednafen core they should work with the software one and I can see games working with the Rearmed core but not the other 2 because the Mednafen core is much pickier over the disk images.

How much system ram do you have ?