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Ideal hardware for emulation dedicated system?

Quizosde

New member
So I want to make a dedicated emulation computer, with a tv out and 4 controller inputs, ya know, an emu box.

Anyway, I want to be able to emulate:
NES
SNES
Gameboy
N64

and possibly:
Gameboy Advance
playstation

I'll love some input on what you think would be the ideal hardware for this system. NES, SNES, and gameboy should be no problem, but for N64 I'm not sure about the neccessary speed/ram/graphics card. Let me know what you think, your input is greatly appreciated!
 

Clements

Active member
Moderator
I'd say 1.2GHz + Voodoo 5 + 256MB RAM would be sufficient to run N64 with Glide64 and PSX with Lewpy's Glide plugin with good quality video and sound. The faster the processor the faster the frame rate will be and the cleaner the audio will be. If you don't want to be limited to Glide plugins and want to use D3D/OpenGL then get a fast nVidia/Radeon card.
 

Doomulation

?????????????????????????
I'd say, if you want best gfx in ps emulation, you need a card that supports pixel shader 2.0 (ie, dx9 card). Then you can use the pete's ogl2 plugin with yummy pixel shader effects ^_^
 

vleespet

The decent one
You need to keep 2 things in mind:

When you are using a voodoo card, you won't need a very fast CPU (800 mhz should be enough for most games, but 1,2 should run nearly all games at a nice speed).
There is no use to run a game on a tv at 1600x1200x32 with 6x FSAA, since the tv only supports 720x576 (PAL), and 2x AA should be enough to render the game nicely.

So the final specs will be:

PIII 1,2 ghz (or amd, if you prefer)
256 mb ram
Voodoo 4/5 (voodoo 5 supports hw T&L, and there might be a little advantage in the future for this, but if you don't look at that, the voodoo 4 should be enough).
Note that 1964 has better performance than PJ64, so keep that in mind when installing the n64 emus.
 

fivefeet8

-= Clark Kent -X- =-
The voodoo 5 doesn't support HW T&L. It uses software T&L like all the voodoo cards. I suggest you get yourself a cheap Dx9 compatible video card(for petes OGL2 in psx emus, tv-out), a voodoo5 5500 pci for your N64games.
 

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