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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

I think the C64 Direct-to-TV by Jeri Ellsworth was quite a success in terms of userbase. Of course the problem with making and selling hardware is increased IP scrutiny.

I think the Raspberry Pi or Beaglebone would make good candidates for baremetal emulation. The Pi has a formidable but barely documented vector processor, and the Beaglebone has the (also under-supported) PRU realtime subsystems which would be ideal for controllers and audio.

Both also have enough ecosystem to make it worth doing. Retropie is already popular, although it's a straight port of the normal userland emulators and doesn't attempt to do anything fancy with the hardware. I think there is a "market" (not the kind that pays money, but a decent userbase) which will happily dedicate a cheap SBC to booting straight into emulators.

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Well, debatable on the C64 instance. Indeed, if you can manage to commercially market your design, then you could get a userbase in the thousands. But compare that to the millions of downloads something like Dolphin gets.

And the ARM-based mini systems could work for retro emulators in general, sure. Presuming someone actually writes a true bare-metal OS for them instead of just a lightweight Linux instance. But they're not fast enough for people like me that are obsessive about exacting emulation accuracy. I'm still hoping we'll get to a point where ARM-based computers are taken more seriously and we start getting a real market for products like the Jetson TX1 to compete against budget AMD systems.

All of this stuff involves sacrifices. The more you chase latency, accuracy, etc ... the more you alienate your potential market. Even when we're not looking for money, more users is such a potent motivator to validate that our efforts aren't being wasted.

Last time I used retropie it wouldn't correctly render vibrato effects in the music, so all of FFVI's wonderful score came out flat and awful. That was over a year agohowever, maybe its been updated.

The Raspberry Pi just isn't powerful enough for cycle-accuracy with the SNES. Maybe if a wizard like blargg attempted it by writing the whole thing in pure ARM assembly, but for mere mortals like myself, as awesome as it'd be, it's just not going to happen :(

Retropie is Linux right? That will have the same latency issues discussed. A more realtime OS is needed.

retropie is an emulator frontend for linux. he was likely using Snes9x.

Also, linux has realtime kernel patches, which help a lot. Distributions like KXStudio ship them by default.

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