> And as others have noted, it's prolly going to suck for NES/SNES emulation.

It works great for NES/SNES emulation, and even N64 emulation with an appropriate video plugin.

Ah, is that the latest model of the RasPi? It was lagging quite abit on my older Rasberry Pi B model.

What emulator are you using? They have different features and run at very different speeds. You can run zsnes totally fine on something that has no hope of running bsnes/higan. Try some others.

Pretty sure ZSNES is written in x86 assembly, so it wouldn't run all that well on Raspberry Pi, which is using ARM CPU considering that you would need to emulate an emulator.

That's easy! Just use Bochs. Don't bother with recompilation, just use interpreted x86 :)

ZSNES hasn't been written in full asm since sometime after zsKnight died.

Snes9x is written in C++, IIRC. As is MESS' snes emulator.

Yea, I've had too many issues with imprecise SNES emulation, so I only wanted to use bsnes. I get why people skimp and go for a less precise emu that can handle their hardware, but its too frustrating to me to invest time into a game to be thwarted by emulation failures.

What games? Maybe I was too young or simply didn't care, but every game I tried that ran at all (without immediately obvious bugs) in ZSNES were playable and fun with modest hardware even in the 1990s. Of course I would use BSNES now, or just a real SNES. But back then it was like magic.

Depends when you used ZSNES. There have been times in its history when it's been broken on some very popular games, eg. Yoshis Island, Chrono Trigger, DKC2.

The really frustrating thing was that the bugs wouldn't show up until about halfway through the game, usually when some nonstandard transparency effect was applied. Right at the point when you'd really invested in the game, very annoying.

The other common one was timing problems (ultimately, they're all timing bugs.) Starfox for example used to run something like 20% faster than on hardware. It looked fine, and if you grew up with the PAL version you might assume that the speed increase was just down to version differences, but the game was unplayable.

> Starfox for example used to run something like 20% faster than on hardware/

Make that 200%. I own the original and it's indeed unplayable on zsnes.

Zsnes is a horrible SNES emulator all around. It was decent when it came out 15 years ago, but it mis-emulates so many things it's just not worth bothering with it anymore. Square games (Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Rudra no Hihou) all have wrong sound effects; anything with SuperFX is totally broken; Tri-Star games crash and lock-up randomly (Tales of Phantasia, Star Ocean). And the list goes on and on.

It's sad, because zsnes really has the best UI of the lot, but in 2016 there is simply no reason to use it. Use either bsnes/higan (for 100% accurate emulation) or snes9x (if you want to run it on an underpowered tablet.)

It seems like a lot of the "lesser" emulators have improved now that higan/bsnes is around to show them how it ought to be done. There's a stronger focus on getting the little things right, even if higan-level accuracy isn't achieved (or even desired, given the performance cost and the hardware many of these target—like the Pi)

Is yours the original Pi or Pi 2? The Pi 2 is like 6x more powerful than the Pi, and the Pi 3 is about that much more powerful than the Pi 2.

I have the pi B and I can do SNES pretty decently with a little overclocking. I understand the Pi 2 can do SNES with ease, and N64 pretty well too. I can only imagine the Pi 3 will do N64 smoothly and more.

I use fceux on my raspi model b, and it works flawlessly.

Consider a Steam Link, http://store.steampowered.com/app/353380/ or similar system to mirror the content from your PC. It will handle sending video/audio to your TV/arcade and sending the inputs back the desktop.

I have one of those lying around, but the issue afaik is that the Steam Link kind of takes over the PC that is running the games to stream the system. Hooking up the speaker/controls/VGA of my arcade via a long cable directly to my PC, means Windows sees it as another screen with more devices.

Then I just tell VMWare Workstation that the arcade joystick USB should go directly to the arcade VM, and drag the VM window over to the arcade screen. This means I can use my computer directly as normal (I code in a linux VM on it), while the arcade is running independently. It works really well and lets me use a spare 4ghz core to run Hyperspin+MAME faster than my old arcade PC ever did.

How much latency does one of these add? It might be fine on a modern cinematic console shooter, but a large amount of the appeal of some old arcade games is their frame-perfect timing. I can't imagine that's helped by adding a round trip over the network, not to mention streaming the video back. That's gotta add 2-3 frames' latency at the very least.

The default settings have some noticeable latency (5-10ms), but changing the video encoding from "balanced" to "fast" drop it down to almost nothing. You can additionally plug the controller(s) into your PC to further remove any input delay. I can't vouch for emulated arcade games, but it works surprisingly well with a steam collection.

Axiom Verge was unplayable on any settings I tried.

You want to make sure that you have the Steam Link wired into your network, rather than on wireless, because that makes a huge difference.

Otherwise, it's gotten so they are pretty decent now. When the Links first came out, they were quite laggy and unstable, but after a hundred or so patches, it's settled down.

I'm modding my old iCade cabinet to make a bartop with an 8" LCD monitor, and I opted to use an Atom based stick PC. I'm going to use the stick PC for running retro emulation locally, and streaming from Steam via the Windows Steam client.

I'm also going to use an HDMI switcher so that I can connect it to a faster machine like my laptop as an option.

I am playing with a RetroPie based gaming system on an rpi3 and all nes and snes games I tried worked without any problem. It even works for PS1,though I only tried one game so far.

Dos games are hit or miss, and it does horribly for N64.

> Dos games are hit or miss, and it does horribly for N64.

Use an optimized video plugin, such as (shameless plug): https://github.com/tachiweasel/mupen64plus-video-videocore

I used to have problems on my Pi2 with N64, but enabling overclocking fixed those issues for me :-)

In regards to SNES / NES sucking.

I tried the retropie about a year ago on my Pi2 and there were no issues at all. Sega Genesis/Megadrive worked well too.