I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on what makes up a good emulation system. Ranging from the cheapest $35 Raspberry PI setup – to the more expensive $200-300 x86 setup. I figured i could spend 5 minutes describing the options (as I recognize them) to help people out.
The Raspberry PI2
While the RPI2 is a great piece of kit, it ultimately suffers from lack of CPU horsepower needed to run more advanced and demanding emulators. It runs them, but the results are rarely playable.
The first thing you need to do with the RPI2 in order to squeeze every last drop of CPU power from it, is to overclock it. This means you need (or you risk frying the CPU) a cheap heat-sink, and preferably put the PI in a cabinet with a fan. With this in order you can do some serious overclocking. In general you can overclock the PI2 to run at 150% the original speed. But overclocking may or may not screw up the system, so be careful.
What is overclocking?
Overclocking is to run the CPU faster than it was designed for.
In essence, all CPU’s has an internal execution interval; a clock. This interval kicks in thousands of times a second, and for each “kick” it executes some machine code and do what CPU’s normally do. Naturally, this “clock tick” has to be in sync with the rest of the hardware, otherwise the CPU risk reading and writing when the other chips are not ready.
A good mental impression here is that of bicyle gears. Everyone that has owned a bike know that if your gear-wire is a bit slack, or your chain is slighly off alignment, you get that weird ticking sound; a sound which usually means you risk slipping or the chain skips ahead when you apply pressure to it. Well, that would be the impression of a poorly overclocked CPU.
But, as you probably remember from being a kid, you can hit the sweet-spot and although the bicycle chain is clicking like mad, it doesnt skip ahead or jump off.
In short: Overclocking is to make the internal CPU clock go faster. Much faster. But you have to hit the sweet spot or it will be out of sync with the rest of the system, and your programs will simply crash. Just like a bicycle with non-aligned gears and chain.
Orange PI PC
The Orange PI PC model is basically a clone of Raspberry PI (RPI is open-source hardware design). It sports a faster CPU, more ram and a different GPU (graphics co-processor). The Orange PI comes in many variations, but the most powerful as of writing is their “PC” model. Why it’s called that I have no idea, but it makes no difference.
Orange PI will perform better and depending on what you want to emulate, give you a smoother experience. But it’s still not fast enough to emulate Playstation or XBox games.
Hummingboard
Now we are talking! The hummingboard has a seriously more powerful cpu, and it will absolutely emulate Playstation 1 games almost flawlessly. It also has more ram, a powerful gpu and will deliver the speed you need for Playstation 1 games.
But the problem? The high end version with 4 gigabytes of ram and the most agressive cpu comes at a whopping $200. So while the RPI2 and Orange-Pie are relatively cheap (at around $35-$60 depending), we have now jumped all the way up to $200.
This is because the hummingboard is, well, embedded hardware not really designed for cheap hobby experiments. Its designed for serious stuff by geeks in long white robes; people that design oil-rigs for fun.
And at that budget you are better served by getting a proper mini-itx pc which is at least 100 times faster than all the other options put together. You can actually build a decent workstation at that price.
Micro ITX PC
Once we step up to mini-atx, you have so much to choose from. I would suggest you go for a Socket-AM1 motherboard, and the powerful and cheap AMD Athlon 5350 CPU. This is simply because Intel at that price just sucks. There is a huge glitch between the Celeron processors and the i2-i7 processors, a glitch that AMD fills in nicely with the 5300 range of processors. So at this price range there is no competition, AMD wins flat down.
In Norway you get each part for around 400NKR ($40), and the whole system comes in at just over $220. This includes a CoolerMaster cabinet, powersupply, 16 gigabytes of ram and a solid-state harddisk.
This micro-itx system will run EVERYTHING you throw at it. Including Playstation 4 games (yes there is an emulator, but it’s still in its infancy). So with such a setup you really have the best kit for emulation available. It will run anything be it N64 emulation, PSX 1, 2 and 3 games, XBox games — the works!
Another good aspect is that Emulation Station, which is a fancy front-end to all emulators known to mankind (that you control with a joystick/gamepad) — runs straight off Linux. In other words, you dont need to buy an operating system to use the setup, all you need is to install Emulation Station. And you can setup Linux to boot directly into Emulation Station, making it a proper game machine!
Other bits, like wireless gamepad controllers, is also easier once you have Linux or Windows running in the background. If you use Windows then you can pretty much pick up any wireless gamepad; if you go for Linux, most will work but always double check before you buy.
Setting your linux/windows machine to share out the roms folder (where you put your games) on the local network is also a good idea. Then you can copy over game files from the comfort of your PC or Mac without having to fiddle to much with things.
Here is the full setup
- AMD Athlon 5350, Socket-AM1 CPU
- ASUS AM1M-A, Socket-AM1 motherboard
- Cooler Master Elite 120 micro-ITX
- Corsair VS450, 450W PSU
- HyperX Fury DDR3 1866MHz 8GB Blue
- Kingston SSDNow 120GB
RetroMod World 
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