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Joelbagz

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Sup everyone!

First time poster here. As of today Ive decided to finally dive into the emulation world. Turning 29 tomorrow and as the rest of the 80 and 90s babies i was brought up on SEGA master system. N64, PS1 SNES and boy were they some good times. ANYWAY onto the topic at hand.

I am building my first PC and a dedicated one at that. Just ordered my Fractal design node 202 case. With hardware components being decided and purchased tomorrow.
As this is going to be for emulators only i am really keen to keep it consolish if thats even a term,

If anyone has any advice in the meantime on hardware necessity's please let me know,  I've got about a $1500 budget assuming everything i buy is new and will be able to handle some newish games if needed. I will update pictures as the parts come in and the build starts,

 

Cant wait to get launch box installed and begin the emulator & rom installs!!!

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Depends on what you want to emulate really so without knowing your goals its hard to say. If you have a $1500 budget you should be able to get a pretty nice PC but if you don't really want to emulate say Wii U PS 3 3DS and the newer stuff that is out there you really won't need to spend all of that money. I personally would buy the best PC I could if that was my budget and just plan on having it for the next few years.

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The original plan was for just SNES. N64 PS1 ect. But realizing it can be kind of a complete game PC. I would like to be able to emulate as much as possible. If this could include as much new stuff as possible then fantastic.

Or am i missing some specific info one would usually need prior to design? From what i understand the Emulator side is CPU heavy. With normal PC games being GPU heavy. So a half decent gaming PC would be fine to run any emulator?

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On 2/27/2019 at 1:20 AM, DOS76 said:

Depends on what you want to emulate really so without knowing your goals its hard to say. If you have a $1500 budget you should be able to get a pretty nice PC but if you don't really want to emulate say Wii U PS 3 3DS and the newer stuff that is out there you really won't need to spend all of that money. I personally would buy the best PC I could if that was my budget and just plan on having it for the next few years.

So i ended up going over budget by 25% Ended up going with a mini itx setup. MSi 390i MB with 9th gen i5 cpu to match. 16gb ram and a Radeon RX 590 gpu.
All bundled up in a Phanteks Evolv Shift case. Cant wait for it to arrive and run it solely as a dedicated emulator!

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  • 2 weeks later...

LOL. It is so easy to start in one place and just keep going. What I decided for myself was that my primary need was all the original 80s games I owned in my arcade (so MAME) and all the classic consoles and Pins up to about 2001. I probably don't even need Dreamcast and XBox since I mostly care about arcade games and I prefer to play those games on my original consoles, but I have them. I have a Raspberry Pi setup too that runs everything up into the 90s. That one is more about experimenting with what I can get out of a Pi and having something portable. So my $30 single board computer runs 90% of what I actually play.

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6 hours ago, FlightRisk said:

I have a Raspberry Pi setup too that runs everything up into the 90s. That one is more about experimenting with what I can get out of a Pi and having something portable. So my $30 single board computer runs 90% of what I actually play.

^^ this ... recently made a little retropie setup using a nespi case and it's very nice. It's not as flashy as LB/BB but it's so easy to use. I made a little LB plugin to export the LB library to EmulationStation (on retropie), and I'll probably upload that plugin soon.

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1 hour ago, eatkinola said:

^^ this ... recently made a little retropie setup using a nespi case and it's very nice. It's not as flashy as LB/BB but it's so easy to use. I made a little LB plugin to export the LB library to EmulationStation (on retropie), and I'll probably upload that plugin soon.

Very cool. Let me know when you post it and I will take a look. The too most amazing things that I have seen so far for playing around with the Pi from my laptop are WebtroPie and RetroPie Manager. I really like ES. Nothing Like LB/BB, but at least the closest thing on a Pi

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On 3/14/2019 at 8:57 PM, FlightRisk said:

Very cool. Let me know when you post it and I will take a look.

Posted the platform exporter. The bundled PDF describes it a little and I think it's pretty easy to use, but let me know if you have any questions. If you do, please post to the download page or open up a new topic since I've kinda gotten this thread off topic (sorry @Joelbagz).

 

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On 2/28/2019 at 5:56 AM, Joelbagz said:

So i ended up going over budget by 25% Ended up going with a mini itx setup. MSi 390i MB with 9th gen i5 cpu to match. 16gb ram and a Radeon RX 590 gpu.
All bundled up in a Phanteks Evolv Shift case. Cant wait for it to arrive and run it solely as a dedicated emulator!

That case looks very nice, and on the surface looks pretty easy to work with as far as ITX cases go. Your CPU and RAM sound on the level; the i5 should serve you well for emulation. I'm not familiar with radeon cards but that one seems nice. Hope you enjoy your foray into rig building and emulation. If you've not already chosen disk drives, I'd recommend a SSD for your main OS drive and mechanical drive for storing your roms. You could of course go all SSD if you want; prices have come way down in recent years.

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On 3/17/2019 at 10:14 AM, eatkinola said:

Posted the platform exporter. The bundled PDF describes it a little and I think it's pretty easy to use, but let me know if you have any questions. If you do, please post to the download page or open up a new topic since I've kinda gotten this thread off topic (sorry @Joelbagz).

 

LOL it's all good.

So bit of an update. The first week went perfect. PC built installed all drivers and updates ect. Installed launchbox and started looking for rom sets and uploading. Configured my PS4 and Xbox remotes to all the emulators (that wasn't as easy as i anticipated) Had a great system complete for say 2 nights then out of nowhere while playing DayZ, The screen glitched which changing resolutions within the game and the PC crashed.

From then on the PC went into some sort of lockdown and i was locked to 16fps no matter what game. What benchmark program.. 16fps LOCKED!

Spent the next week googling. Emailing MSI, reinstalling drivers. Looking for updates. Changed GPU cards altogether. Turned out to be something within windows. Once i removed and reinstalled windows. Problem went away. I was lucky i saved all my ROMs, ISOs & emulators to the the HDD and it wasn't wiped when i reformatted my SSD. 2 weeks down and been running amazing. Almost ready to hook up to the TV and run BB from the startup like a genuine console.

 

On 3/17/2019 at 10:22 AM, eatkinola said:

That case looks very nice, and on the surface looks pretty easy to work with as far as ITX cases go. Your CPU and RAM sound on the level; the i5 should serve you well for emulation. I'm not familiar with radeon cards but that one seems nice. Hope you enjoy your foray into rig building and emulation. If you've not already chosen disk drives, I'd recommend a SSD for your main OS drive and mechanical drive for storing your roms. You could of course go all SSD if you want; prices have come way down in recent years.

The evlov shift case has been good, Building the system has been the best part so far. With work and two young kids i don't get to play with cars anymore so its good to be able to sit down in the AC at night and build something.  I'm getting a couple of extra fans just to beef up the airflow as this will eventually be mounted in the TV cabinet like a real console and the GPU and Case get a bit to hot for comfort. For storage i went with a barracuda pro 2TB HDD and a 500gb Samsung evo 860 SSD M2.0. Now i have taken my time with the driver & program installs it hasn't missed a beat. Emulators require some tweaking here and there but runs great now.

But as i am reading Roms and ISO's sets are getting harder to find. Which is where i am stuck at now. PS2/3 and Xbox games. Everything else a few googles searches and a few quick links get all the old school stuff sorted pretty fast.

Ill take some photos of the unit complete tomorrow and post. Running Bigbox at the startup is my favorite feature. Only issue i havn't fixed is randomizing my startup videos. Apart from that LB BB is amazing!!

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4 hours ago, Joelbagz said:

Which is where i am stuck at now. PS2/3 and Xbox games.

PS2 is still easy to find, XBox is about the same as it always was but PS3 is and always was difficult because technically speaking they are still "new" games so sites are not so inclined to have them. They are out there though.

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