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Total noob looking for project tips


p03t13

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Hi all, new member. I am in the early stages of planning a project. I will be building an 80s/90s style arcade cabinet that uses a pc to run emulators and a front end like Lunchbox to select system/game. I want to be able to run games from many different systems that I'll list shortly. I'm looking for advice on system specs for the PC and y'alls preferred emulators for each system.

 

System list:

NEW, SNES, GB/C, GBA, SEGA Genesis, SEGA Saturn, SEGA Dreamcast, SEGA Game gear, PlayStation 1

 

Any advice helps, this is the extremely early stages of planning.

Edited by p03t13
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Welcome to the forums. :) As for the emulators i would use Retroarch for all those systems except for Dreamcast for which i would use demul for it.  As for the system that is a difficult one to answer, it will depend on multiple things, most importantly what sort of budget do you have for it? Are you looking for as cheap as possible, or a powerful rig that will play current PC games as well?  Are you looking to emulate PS2, Gamecube/Wii or wii u as well?

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It doesnt need to be super powerful.  This pc will be dedicated to this arcade machine project. After initial setup it probably won't even be on the Wi-Fi. I do know that Dreamcast and ps1 emulators can be a bit demanding I have a "working" Dreamcast emulator on my current gaming rig. (Sorry I should mention I'm not TOTALLY new to emulation, just to trying to emulate using a front end, and using systems beyond snes.) As far as budget, I haven't gotten to that point as of yet. I'm gonna say around $1000.00 max for the pc (I can be flexible with it but I think that much should be able to make something that can run ps1 stuff)

Edited by p03t13
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Oh right yeah, if you are looking to spend that sort of money then you won't have any problems building a machine to run those systems. I would just go with the latest i5 or i7 with 16gb of ram, a ssd for windows, and a mechanical drive for Launchbox and all your roms. If you wan't to upscale PS1 to a higher resolution or emulate gamecube/wii or wii u then you will need a graphics card also, but that won't be necessary if you are going to emulate the older 8bit and 16bit systems as they use cpu only. 

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Yeah as @DOS76 said Retroarch is both a frontend and a emulator suite. It includes dozens of different emulators and will unify your controlls across all the different systems. If you use it with launchbox you don't ever have to see the frontend part of it, it will just be used as a emulator.

 

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4 minutes ago, p03t13 said:

Out if curiosity, why does the drive for the emu/roms need to be a mechanical one?

It doesn't "need" to be, but depending on how many systems and games you are going to setup it could be a lot of space, and traditional hdd's are a lot cheaper. For reference i have about 12,000 games in launchbox with all the images an video's and i'm close to 1.5TB, that would need a very expensive ssd to fit it all. 

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I had difficulties to launch some of my games, I downloaded both beetle and pcsx cores. Beetle is for having original resolution I guess, graphics are closer to original.

And I could not make pcsx work so I dropped it since epsxe was working for me, I didn't want to bother. 

Also I have epsxe on android and I sync both system's save files. 

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