RetroPie?

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DaHeckIzDat
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RetroPie?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » August 22nd, 2017, 2:02 pm

I can't believe I'm saying this. I said I wouldn't do this. But the fact that Nintendo is making it so freaking hard to buy a SNES Classic is making me consider just buying a Raspberry Pi and going the RetroPi route. Does anybody here have experience with this? I have absolutely no knowledge of how computers work, so will I still be able to do it? Is this possibly something I could get in trouble for using?

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ptdebate
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Re: RetroPie?

Postby ptdebate » August 22nd, 2017, 6:13 pm

DaHeckIzDat wrote:I can't believe I'm saying this. I said I wouldn't do this. But the fact that Nintendo is making it so freaking hard to buy a SNES Classic is making me consider just buying a Raspberry Pi and going the RetroPi route. Does anybody here have experience with this? I have absolutely no knowledge of how computers work, so will I still be able to do it? Is this possibly something I could get in trouble for using?


Honestly, as someone who's delved a lot into emulation, I can say that it's just not worth the trouble, because the emulation quality is never going to be as consistent as Nintendo's own Virtual Console. Better to load up your Wii/WiiU with the small list of retro games you want to play and enjoy them in impeccable quality rather than try to run ALL the games in a compromised state.

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scotland
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Re: RetroPie?

Postby scotland » August 22nd, 2017, 10:27 pm

I'll play the other side then.

Learn one system and you have a jack of all trades, whether its windows, raspberry pi, android, or linux. Is it perfect - no, but aiming at perfect comes at too high a cost per game. Is it totally legit - no, we know ROMs need to be acquired on an internet back alley. You have to cool with those going in, but even buying a Nintendo Classic isn't going to enrich any programmers a quarter of a century later.

Seriously, if you are a perfectionist, why are we talking anything but real hardware on a real CRT, warts and all. If thats your speed, great, I love vintage too. However, many of us want to experience many games, of many systems, on a modern tv. We can't really ever set the dial back to 1986 or 1992 or whenever no matter what we do. Nothing will ever be 100% authentic.

I don't care about Speedy Gonzalez when the SNES library is vast with games emulators handle good enough. How do I get to experience that vast library - why emulation, of course. In a way, especially for NES games, its authentic in that famiclones were part of the landscape for years.

Consider your resources and options. Buying a SNES Classic from Nintendo also comes with a price - feeding business practices or business decisions that seem unsound and destined to end up with high priced scalped units under a Christmas tree.

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ptdebate
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Re: RetroPie?

Postby ptdebate » August 22nd, 2017, 10:53 pm

I guess I'm more of a quality person than an authenticity person. I honestly believe that emulation can be a superior way to experience a game than the original hardware. A great example is the GBA Virtual Console games on Wii U, which represent a drastic improvement over the original hardware (unless you must play on the go).

Fan-made SNES emulators can reproduce graphics very well, but I'm more sensitive to sound quality, and when it comes to sound on the PC emulators I've tried, there's always something not quite right.

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ptdebate
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Re: RetroPie?

Postby ptdebate » August 27th, 2017, 9:27 am

Okay, so...I would like to revise my original opinion.

It appears emulation has come a long way while I wasn't looking. I recently downloaded a free software called "OpenEmu" on my laptop. I was able to load up a list of NES and SNES roms and get started playing within minutes. The emulation quality is excellent. On TOP of that, it's easy to pair a Wii Remote to my MacBook Pro. Like, stupidly easy. The gaming experience is overall convenient, intuitive, and high-quality. I highly urge anyone to check out OpenEmu.

strat
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Re: RetroPie?

Postby strat » August 27th, 2017, 1:23 pm

Better yet, you can mod a PSP (It looks like all firmware versions can be modded, though last time I checked it wasn't possible to mod my Vita) or buy a NDS flash card (Check compatibility). PSP and DS have tons of emulators, and you can even play GBA on PSP.

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ptdebate
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Re: RetroPie?

Postby ptdebate » August 27th, 2017, 2:29 pm

strat wrote:Better yet, you can mod a PSP (It looks like all firmware versions can be modded, though last time I checked it wasn't possible to mod my Vita) or buy a NDS flash card (Check compatibility). PSP and DS have tons of emulators, and you can even play GBA on PSP.


That is true, and I used to have a modded PSP. But I can't play emulators on my PSP while pretending to do work ;).

Paul Campbell
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Re: RetroPie?

Postby Paul Campbell » August 27th, 2017, 4:17 pm

I've been emulating a while and my favorite way is still using the Homebrew Channel on my hacked Wii console so I can use the Wii Classic controll for all my gaming up to N64. It's a tad harder than it used to be since the Homebrew Browser went offline, so you have to do things manually, but I seem to have essentially zero lag with the Wiimote compared to, for example, a good Nintendo Game pad clone running to my Nvidia Shield. By all means, if someone has a better option I'm in, but I keep falling back to this whenever I attempt to update to a newer option, be it the Shield, Ouya, or anything else.

DaHeckIzDat
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Re: RetroPie?

Postby DaHeckIzDat » August 28th, 2017, 1:03 pm

All right, I'm giving this a shot. I'm using RetroArch and I've downloaded two SNES games from Openemu. Downloaded the correct core to play SNES games. But now all the tutorials I'm reading say it should be able to detect these files, but it doesn't. I've got them in my downloads folder, but when I open that up it says "No Items." Anyone know what's going wrong here and how to fix it?

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ptdebate
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Re: RetroPie?

Postby ptdebate » August 28th, 2017, 9:52 pm

DaHeckIzDat wrote:All right, I'm giving this a shot. I'm using RetroArch and I've downloaded two SNES games from Openemu. Downloaded the correct core to play SNES games. But now all the tutorials I'm reading say it should be able to detect these files, but it doesn't. I've got them in my downloads folder, but when I open that up it says "No Items." Anyone know what's going wrong here and how to fix it?


What I do is just drag and drop the ROMs into the OpenEmu program. There should be a space that shows you where to drop them. See below:

SS1.png
SS1.png (87.53 KiB) Viewed 1705 times


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