New to retro emulation

Hello folks, I recently discovered the joy of single board computers when I bought a raspberry pi 3 and wanted to build a small SBC system for retro console gaming with Lakka. However I am unsure on how far to dig into my pockets. I was hoping to be able to run up to N64, PS1, Dreamcast era games.

What is the general opinion of people when it come to emulation? Will something around a pi3 or odriod x4 work? I have seen the Rockpro64, but searching around seems to get mixed result in terms of stability and performance. I have also seen some cheap Intel NUCs with Celerons from the N2800 and N3000 series.

Avoid pi3, N2800 and N3000 if you want to run N64, PS1 and Dreamcast games at full speed. Your best bet is probably an odroid xu4.

PS1 emulation on a pi3 should be ok with the PCSX-Rearm core running at the lower graphics settings. The CPU on all of those will be limiting to the Beetle PSX cores probably at least until the Dynarec CPU emulation is completed.

Forget about N64 as it’s pretty resource heavy. Dreamcast may be possible with similar spec devices.

Thanks for the reply, What about the Rockpro64? Seems to be one of the more powerful SBCs I can find for under 100. I also saw a Gigabyte Brix with a J4105 for about 120, but a review said it was secure boot only, so I dont think stuff like Lakka would even install on it.

Should be a close match for the odroid xu4, however if you aren’t an IT guy i would recommend the odroid xu4 instead, finding support for this one will be easier.

Careful with the x86 except if the cpu frequency is a lot higher, the systems you mentioned all have arm(32?) dynarecs iirc, that’s not necessarily true when used on x86, leading to awful performances if the x86 has a cpu frequency barely above the arm.