| said: That... is... sweet!
Oh God! *drools* That is seriously cool! One console to rule them all! Talk about a retro-junkie's wet dream! I'm almost salivating here!
I'm not familiar with that one so I had to look it up. I must say, the i5 4250U seems like an expensive choice for the task. I don't know how recent these prices are but multiple sources list it at over $300. I realize it has the on-board graphics - which is nice to have included, don't get me wrong - but you're only running games up to the PS2, Gamecube, etc. You could probably get a ten-year-old GPU for $30 that would handle anything the 6th gen could throw at it. And now that I think about it, integrated or not, does the GPU even matter when it comes to emulation? My understanding was that emulation is pretty much 100% CPU dependent. I'm not really familiar with how SoCs work, but as far as raw processing power goes, the benchmarks I looked at show the 4250U to be comparatively weak when compared to most straight-up (and cheaper) CPUs. To be clear, this isn't meant as a criticism. It would just be a shame if you paid a lot for an SoC with HD5000 Graphics and then didn't get any actual benefit from it. Mind you, that's assuming you bought it for this purpose in the first place. It's possible that you only used this hardware because you happened to have the NUC. And then, of course, there is the matter of fitting everything inside the case. It's true that most PC form factors are probably more than you could squeeze into a Dreamcast, but I wonder... hmm. How about an original Xbox case? I'm sure you could pack some sweet hardware into that. You could call it the EmulatorBox! It could have a picture of Arnie on it with the phrase, "You have been Emulated!" ... Ok, maybe not.
Objective successful! But now, having accomplished that, do we get a demo? You can't just leave us hanging with some pictures; we need to see it in action! Any chance of a video? I'd really be interested to see both how it runs the games and how it navigates the emulators.
Squeeeeee!!! |
First of all, thanks for the accolades... :) I'll try to answer some questions and points you made in the post above.
Regarding the emulator front end:
PC is using Windows 8 but a Maximus Arcade front end with a custom skin. Instead of booting to explorer.exe which is the normal Windows shell, I am booting straight in to maximus arcade. Windows 8 supports multiple accounts hence I can still use it with a different user account, but for this, you click on Dreamcast account, and you're in the emulator frontend within 30 seconds.
The hardest part for this process was setting up all of the emulators. I set up around 15-20 or so emulators with my fave games which took like a month (controllers setup, visual filter setup, bios...). MAME was a bitch lol.
Regarding the PC I chose:
You're right that emulation is dependant on CPU for the most part but there are a few emulators that need a GPU as well on 1080p settings (Dolphin and PCX2 to be exact). There isn't a lot of documentation on this but on most forums people state the Intel HD 4000 is not good enough to do Wii/Gamecube at 1080p smoothly. Hence I really wanted the HD5000 GPU. The Iris Pro gpu found in the high end NUC's would have been amazing if the damn thing wasn't overheating and throttling all the time. :)
Regarding the form factor:
Believe it or not, I initially wanted to do this with a Genesis and a desktop thin ITX board/i3 4150. I have a Sega Genesis model 2 all cut up and the CPU+board at home. Let's just say that it wasn't meant to be. I needed a taller system and after the Genesis, Dreamcast was my favorite so it made sense to use that. Then I decided to just go with a NUC and made life much simpler for me. :)
If one wanted to build a serious gaming rig out of a classic console, they could use a Snes or NES, XBOX 1, Genesis + Sega CD or even a Sega Saturn. Those were large enough to house a decent CPU + a small dedicated GPU (ie GTX 760 mini).
Regarding the video:
Sounds good. :) I will make one in a week or two and post it here... :)
