DJQuad Posted October 15, 2016 Share Posted October 15, 2016 Hey all, so a very quick backstory from a former HyperSpin user - a friend built an arcade cab and the PC he was planning on using suffered a horrible death, so he wondered if his Raspberry Pi could somehow run it. Although a PC running LaunchBox is obviously preferred, the Pi was his only option to get his arcade working. I offered to help, and even got a Raspberry Pi of my own test out what I've been hearing about - RetroPie. Working with it and doing some research, I was so blown away how many with cabs and others in the community use Raspberry Pis. It's literally the standard for those that don't use PCs. RetroPie includes most of not all of the Retroarch cores and relies heavily on it. I originally thought there would be a licensing issues but RetroPie is as free as LaunchBox. I'm no lawyer but including the cores in a free product shouldn't be a problem. Anyway, the "import" process is even easier than LaunchBox's if you can believe that. All I did was put roms in preconfigured directories such as roms/arcade, roms/coleco, roms/snes, etc. RetroPie detected that there are roms there at launch, preconfigured everything, the system itself, and (optionally) automatically downloaded media/metadata. As a test i uploaded a rom to roms/snes and literally everything worked. It doesn't get more simple than that. No prompts, no input, it just worked. Of course that takes a lot of Jason's magic behind the scenes to make all that happen, but between things like that and making LaunchBox available to Linux, the popularity would be even more. Heck, it would be SO easy to offer a preconfigured SD card image like https://retropie.org.uk/download loaded with LaunchBox. Your thoughts are welcomed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lordmonkus Posted October 16, 2016 Share Posted October 16, 2016 A very similar subject to this has come up in the past and there are a couple of reasons why this is not a trivial thing. For starters RetroPie being based purely around the Libretro cores, they basically built a UI for it. There is no flexibility to add other emulators and this is one of Launchbox's many advantages. Second, Jason is just a one man programming team and dedicating time to program a UI from the ground up for a Linux port of Launchbox to simply mimic RetroPie is not feasible. Maybe one day he will have an army of monkeys programming for him a Linux port of Launchbox can be made It's not that your idea is bad, and it isn't a bad idea. It's just one that is simply not feasible currently for Launchbox. Edit: Here is the discussion similar to this topic previously, things got a little heated but in the end it was all good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DJQuad Posted October 16, 2016 Author Share Posted October 16, 2016 You can add other emulators to RetroPie, but this isn't a feature by feature comparison for RetroPie vs LaunchBox. Of course it's not feasible right now. I watch the live streams and know Jason is the programming department of LB/BB.. heh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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