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Hello anyone built a mini pc ?


Venom

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Hi, I know on some forums they have a hello shout. So hello from the UK !

I own a couple of arcade cabinets. One running a pi and crt for vertical games and one running  a PC  with another gui front end. I also have a RPI running retropie.  I have a pimped up dreamcast and wii and XBOX X .

I always remember setting it all up in mame with pictures etc to be a complete pain !

Having got a mame non clones 202 romset, I was pleasantly  surprised by the import wizard in Launchbox and how accurate it was downloading all the stuff on top.

I have a small issue with launching prehistorice isles which I have posted serprately. 

Although I do have a raspberry pi, I am quite interested in the Sinden light gun and thought would maybe put something together with a bit better spec, so hopefully can run dolphin to play some shooters via some other systems and mame. Hoping with Launchbox or a change to mame it can get a border all the way around ! Not ordered a lightgun yet, want to see how people get on with it first.  Also would be more interested when they show some more two player supported games.

I have managed to grab a controller file for XBOX 4 player and created  and inserted into the mame.ini.

I am thinking about a  mini pc  build maybe an i5 4th generation or above , , 16gb   nuc, Lenova 73P or similar then using launchbox. I do have a gdemu and original Wii  but would like to see how dreamcast and wii games play and look  via a i5  PC. 

Although I would like to play rambo using teknoparrot that would require an expensive NUC or an SFF, as needs a decent gpu ,  and not sure want to get something that big TBH. Those canyon boxes even secondhand are still very expensive too !

Just wondered if anyone else had built a mame mini pc , what they got in the end  ? Also are they very noisy fans in the mini PC's ?. Any Recommendations.?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Thats's interesting  and will search and take a look. I did look at some second hand Hades Canyon on ebay but were very very pricey !

The other build I found was this.  My only tweak would be a slightly bigger case. It just looks so cramped would worry me about the heat. I have never pasted a chip before so want it to be idiot proof. I was not aware you could get a processor with the Ryzen on it TBH.

Not built a desktop  PC properly for about 20 years !!

 

T

 

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If you plan to put it inside a cabinet the look and size don't really matter, I have mine standing underneath my TV between PS4 and XBox One, so size matters a lot to me. Plus the Hades Canyon also looks very neat.

The Mini-ITX ETA uses doesn't seem bigger than the Hades though, you have to look up the sizes perhaps, but you will probably have problems putting decent hardware inside, especially PSU, thus you're gonna be quite restricted.

Edited by DeadVoivod
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Yes, I am going to have mine in lounge under TV for this one.  Will keep an eye out. Cheers

My two cabinets I tend to play older stuff in and has an uncased pc in one and a pi for the other.

Cheers

 

 

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I've decided to upgrage the Raspberry Pi on my arcade with a proper PC, so I got a MiniITX MB with a Ryzen processor. 

Depending on your needs you can even go with an APU, making it cheaper, smaller and easier to cool.

In my case I have decided to use a 980Ti that I had laying around, but that's because I had space inside the Arcade machine, but I can say that the whole setup is barely audible. The new Ryzen CPUs are amazingly easy to keep cool and the stock cooler is more than enough.

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  • 2 weeks later...

well that is pretty much standard operating procedure for hardware. If its running Windows it will get Windows updates but not may manufacturers keep putting out updates for their hardware after a certain point. Instead they make new hardware.

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Like I said that is basically how things are for all PCs the manufacturer puts out a computer it comes with drivers and such and maybe there will be some revised drivers a new bios but after two years you are lucky to get anything. Unless there is some kind of issue then they may push out a fix.

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Made me think, playing with that thought already for a bit longer. Intel has the new NUCs, coming out early in July, called Ghost Canyon (NUC 9 Extreme). https://simplynuc.com/ghost-canyon/

Advantage is that you can put a GPU inside, and you have the possibility to go up to an RTX 2070. I was in contact with SimplyNUC just now, and they will get back to me as I wanted to know which model of RTX 2070 they're installing, as they couldn't tell me in the chat. 

I think I will sell my Hades Canyon and get this one, would also work a lot better for PC gaming. Would be only for convenience, as I have a rather new gaming PC (a bit over 1 year old), but it's in another room, but I want one in my living room, next to my consoles, so that I can use it on my beamer (4K), and also be able to have the nice 5.1 sound. It has to be small though, as you know wives tend to not like too much of the electronic stuff to be visible, they'd rather put a new flower pot instead. But this would fit well, as the width is just slightly more than the Hades, it's only about double the height, but that still fits well, and the PSU is internal, the Hades has a quite big external PSU. 

Plus sitting or lying on the couch whilst playing is priceless. 

Edited by DeadVoivod
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  • 5 months later...

I build a mini-pc dedicated to retro gaming, just for LaunchBox/BigBox emulation.

It works great (with a very little tweaking) out of the box and it is connected to a 65" 4K TV.

MiniPC specs:

APU: AMD Ryzen 5 3400G (4 cores / 8 threads @3.7Ghz) with iGPU RX Vega 11 (11 cores @1200Mhz) - €135
RAM: 8Gbyte DDR4 @2933Mhz - €70
Disk: 1x SSD (1Tbyte) - €90
Mini Barebone: AsRock Deskmini A300 (MB Asrock a300, integrated Realtek HD soundboard, stock cooler, no overclocking possible) - €140
Total cost: about €435 (less then $400)

It runs games from Atari 2600 up to the PSX, Saturn, N64, Dreamcast at fullspeed using RetroArch cores.

PSP (using PPSSPP): fullspeed at 2x resolution
Nintendo DS (using DeSmuMe): fullspeed at 2x resolution
Playstation2 (using PCSX2): fullspeed at native resolution
Gamecube/Wii (using Dolphin): fullspeed at native resolution

For a smooth experience in BigBox, I set the desktop resolution to 1920x1080 using HD videos for games media.
Also, to avoid audio issues I was having via HDMI, I connected a soundbar to the PC for the audio playback.

The TV itself is able to do an excellent job at upscaling of lower resolution rendered images, so in the end the result is quite stunning in my opinion.


 

 

Edited by DeusX81
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I am using a humble Intel NUC7i3BNH

It's only a 7th gen i3 processor, but it gets the job done and I can emulate all the 8-bit and 16-bit consoles perfectly.

32-bit emulation is limited only to 3DO, CD-i, and PS1.

Redream and PPSSPP works well for most titles, but anything above that it out of the question.

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