Basic Needs for Various Cores. , PSP, PSX, 3DO, N64, etc

RetroArch General
#1

I’ve been playing with Retroarch for a while now, generally on my XBOX and Wii, though a little on my laptop as well.

It was not until recently that I discovered Lakka, which as you know, is a Linux distrobution based upon Openelec, that aims to boot straight into Retroarch and nothing else. If that’s not the ultimate form of techno flattery I don’t know what is!

Anyhow, Lakka uses the latest sources and thus supports PSP, 3DO, and a few other things that the old code does not, such as the cersion of Retroarch you find on the Ubuntu Software Manager by default.

With all of that being said, what I’d like to know are what are the hardware requirements for the various cores. Naturally the low end systems will not require a very high end computer to emulate. On the other hand one would have to assume that you need something fairly modern to pull of PSP correctly.

I’ve been doing a little testing and have been coming back with some strange results.

I.E. I also have an old 3.0 Ghz P4 with a 400Mhz FSB, 512Mb RAM, and built in Intel GFX which if I recall correctly are of the 910 or 945 chip series. Anyhow, it pretty well served it’s purpose. Jaguar was incredibly slow, which is odd because I think some jaguar games can be ran full speed on a classic XBOX. On the other hand, PSP games actually loaded up and almost ran at a playable speed. I had no idea PSP could run in software mode! 3DO seemed to run perfectly, though N64 was another no go. I ended up putting in a GeForce GT 430, and that brought the PSP emulation to full speed, but didn’t improve anything else.

I also tested on a 2.8 Ghz self build ASUS system with GeForce 9800Gt+ and got the same results, except that N64 worked but 3DO didn’t for what ever reason. I re-installed Lakka, and the reversed was true… STRANGE!

Now I have a Zotac ZBOX ID41 PLUS that I picked up off Ebay to dedicate to Lakka, and it plays N64 choppy, will not load a PSX game. Plays some PSP games fine (Castlevania) some Choppy, and some not at all, though on my other systems, the game that are choppy or will not work on the Zotac are fine. All but Star Wars Lethal Aliance, it plays fine on my Laptop under Windows PPSSPP, but not on Lakka, it always crashes or hangs the system. I wonder why?

3DO runs like total crap, and I’ve not even tested the Jaguar yet.

The Zotac has pretty nice specs, NVIDIA graphics, 1.8Ghz Atom. I know Atom isn’t the best CPU, but for emulation is should be enough shouldn’t it, I mean it runs Bioshock and Far Cry 2 for crying out loud!

So what is this Zotac lacking that the old 3.0 Ghz, 400Mhz FSB computer had? Is 3Ghz really needed to play N64, 3DO, Jag, PSP, etc. without stutter, crashing, etc?!?!

Thanks in advance for any insight!

#2

Atoms are very weak processors. It may well be that your old P4 is actually faster than the newer Atom. Go to https://cpubenchmark.net and compare the 2 processors.

#3

The P4 630 isn’t listed sadly, though the Atom is. Not sure what to compare it with. Awesome link though!!!

EDIT: Assuming I guessed right on the P4 chip, these are the results:

[TH][/TH] [TH=“align: center”]Intel Atom D425 @ 1.80GHz[/TH] [TH=“align: center”]Intel Pentium 4 3.00GHz[/TH]

[TR=“class: alt”] Price Search Online Search Online [/TR]

Socket Type BGA559 PGA478

[TR=“class: alt”] CPU Class Desktop Desktop [/TR]

Clockspeed 1.8 GHz 3.0 GHz

[TR=“class: alt”] Turbo Speed Not Supported Not Supported [/TR]

of Physical Cores

1 (2 logical cores per physical) 1 (2 logical cores per physical)

[TR=“class: alt”] Max TDP 10W 81.9W [/TR]

First Seen on Chart Q1 2011 Q4 2008

[TR=“class: alt”]

of Samples

19 1399 [/TR]

Single Thread Rating 270 654[SUP]3[/SUP]

[TR=“class: alt”] CPU Mark 345 359 [/TR]

#4

Most emulators don’t give any hardware specs, which I find odd. Some do however, but you can’t compare those hardware specs to the libretro implementation since some cores are missing a dynarec or are implemented in software rendering, while the original emulator is not etc.

I. e. I remeber playing PSX games on my P4 2.5GHz with an Intel graphics card (same as yours) very well, that was more than 7 years ago. I could play all PSX games I tried just fine. I now have an AsRock Q2900 wich should be the same speed, or even a little faster, but I can’t play any PSX games with retroarch. That is because neither of the cores provides a dynarec for x86(_64) systems.

I think all in all, right now to play up to consoles of the fifth generation you need a CPU with a benchmark of 800+ for single thread from cpubenchmark.net. With dynarec and good rendering that should go down to something like 450+ or even less. (the pentium 4 has a single thread rating of about 600 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html )

Since the CPU is the most involved in emulation, I think going after the CPU benchmarks is a good idea while defining a minimum requirement.

(btw PPSSPP has one of the best dynrecs, thats why it can run smooth on older hardware, and I suspect the n64 core has other issues, i. e. n64 emulation as whole seems to prevent the dynarec from being as efficient as others)

#5

With my Intel Celeron M 900MHz (eee pc 701) cpubenchmark 211 score I get around 34fps on mario64 mupen64plus using rice video plugin. Sadly, dynarec can’t be used for x86 platform. Mednafen-pcx is even slower. It’s a shame nobody is interested in porting dynarec cores to x86 platform. Arm devices which have slower processors can run both mupen64plus and pcx.

#6

[QUOTE=kalehrl;20558]With my Intel Celeron M 900MHz (eee pc 701) cpubenchmark 211 score I get around 34fps on mario64 mupen64plus using rice video plugin. Sadly, dynarec can’t be used for x86 platform.[/QUOTE] Is this true? I thought the mupen64 core has a dynarec for x86, doesn’t it?

I thought that the way n64 emulation works, a dynarec just can’t be efficient as other, cause n64 likes to change the compiled code.

#7

There is dynarec as option but it doesn’t work properly: https://github.com/libretro/mupen64plus-libretro/issues/168