Emulator Box Build - VM or HTPC?

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IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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So I stumbled upon Launchbox / Big Box and while I've come to the realization that I am no longer a PC gamer (and haven't been for many years), the idea of having the ability to play legacy games from my childhood on the TV in my living room both with my son (when he's old enough) and when friends come over seems very attractive. I had explored emulator builds years ago but there didn't seem to be anything that made the experience as user friendly as it seems some of the platforms do today.

So with that said, I'm hoping there are some of you out there who have already been down this path and can advise what avenue I should be exploring.

Ideally, I'd be putting my EPYC 7402p Unraid Server to use for this using a Windows VM (with an Nvidia GTX GPU passed through) with either something like moonlight or Nvidia Game Streaming. I have an Nvidia Shield TV in my living that is wired to my network backbone and I'd love to be able to use that if possible.

However, I have no experience at all with game streaming so I'm not sure how that plays with lag and such. If the experience is not good, it's not worth my time and I'd just as well just do an HTPC build for this.

Thoughts? Suggestions?
 

markarr

Active Member
Oct 31, 2013
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I would look at coinops for the emulation, not sure if that can be streamed our not but, it is well put together and is one thing to acquire.
 

ReturnedSword

Active Member
Jun 15, 2018
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Santa Monica, CA
You will be able to emulate reliably up to 5th gen consoles directly on your Shield using RetroArch. Starting with 6th gen consoles, it becomes spotty. Tbh I'm surprised Dolphin is still around and being developed. I still remember using that on on my Slot A Athlon 1 Ghz way back. Apparently after all these years 6th gen emulation code is still not that optimized, and requires relatively powerful hardware. I'm not sure how you'd be able to stream from your Unraid server's VM, but hardware-wise you should be fine (aside perhaps from streaming).
 

IamSpartacus

Well-Known Member
Mar 14, 2016
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You will be able to emulate reliably up to 5th gen consoles directly on your Shield using RetroArch. Starting with 6th gen consoles, it becomes spotty. Tbh I'm surprised Dolphin is still around and being developed. I still remember using that on on my Slot A Athlon 1 Ghz way back. Apparently after all these years 6th gen emulation code is still not that optimized, and requires relatively powerful hardware. I'm not sure how you'd be able to stream from your Unraid server's VM, but hardware-wise you should be fine (aside perhaps from streaming).
Yea I'm aware that 6th generation and higher requires a lot of power. That's why I'm not looking to the Shield because GC emulation is a deal breaker for me. Have to have it.
 

ReturnedSword

Active Member
Jun 15, 2018
526
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Santa Monica, CA
Tbh I don't have experience with nVidia Game Streaming to remote stream from a PC/VM, so I'm not sure how that will work. Certainly your server's hardware is more than sufficient though to run Dolphin. The main concern would be the streaming performance and latency.

Something that perked my interest this week was the announcement of the Ryzen 4000 mobile APU. I'm quite interested in seeing if whatever desktop variant that will be forthcoming will have greater iGPU performance or not. It's my guess that emulators are still not that optimized for high CPU core counts. Rather it's the CPU and GPU optimizations that are more important. Dolphin's spreadsheet (Dolphin CPU Benchmark (POVRay)) states that quite a few older CPU architectures have good performance for GameCube and Wii, not withstanding the emulation issues with certain niche games.
 

ttabbal

Active Member
Mar 10, 2016
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I have a little system running standalone on a Raspberry Pi 3. It works well till about N64, that's a bit slow. A Core2Duo Mac Mini does well with it though. I didn't try newer systems as GC works on my Wii and I'm using hardware PS3 and XBox One. I considered trying the streaming stuff, but decided to keep it simple and start cheap and low power with a Pi. It's worked out pretty well overall. The idea was to cover the older systems well that are harder to find hardware for and such.