mini pc for emulators

[kambam]

New to the site, looking for some help. I have a friend that has an older Dell inspiron zino HD mini pc hooked up to his tv. Has a bunch of emulators installed and is able to play these directly on the tv with the use of usb NES controllers.

My question is if any of you have such set up and what other pc's do you use. Would something like the Intel NUC kit D34010WYK1 work?
Or maybe the Zotac Zbox.

Just looking for other options. It doesn't even need to be a mini pc. Just hoping to find something in the $250-$500 range. Would also like it to play blue ray

Let me know guy. Thanks

 

[alcoholbob]

I built one for movies and emulators, but its not mini, because I wanted silence. So I built a fanless HTPC with a i5 4430, as you need a fast CPU. Although I probably could have gone with a faster dual core as most emulators just use single or dual threads.

 

[Lonyo]

You can make a cheap mITX PC quite easily which would run emulators and can just throw in a Bluray drive, or get a small prebuilt from Dell or similar which is mITX size.

For low demand uses even an inexpensive prebuild would mostly be OK. Something like a NUC would be OK to a point, but you would need an external Bluray drive, plus you might run out of space unless you get a USB drive, in which case you're getting to the point of needing various external boxes, so might as well go for ITX anyway.

 

[kambam]

Thx guys the only issue here is that I dont plan on building a unit. Want one thats plug and play. I've never put one together and dont think i ever will.

 

[Fox5]

A raspberry pi can do systems up through N64.

So really, any piece of computer hardware will get you that far. Some PSX and N64 games can be a little more demanding. Doing Gamecube or PS2 will require a current gen intel processor though.

The hard part for you would be finding an affordable mini pc with a blu ray drive. You might be better taking an old pc or laptop and hooking up a bluray drive, but blurray is really a hassle on PCs. You need to buy software to play blurray too, so you're better off with a cheap stand alone blu ray player.

If you can forgo your need for a blurray player, you can literally choose just about any option.
Both the nvidia shield and nvidia shield portable can plug into a TV and play emulators and they use Android so the interface isn't too bad.

The MadCatz MOJO is a decent option too, although I think I'd take the nvidia shield portable over it just because it's playable on the go.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...Tpk=mad%20catz

 

[Aikouka]

It sounds sort of like you're looking to play mostly older games. If that's the case, then why not consider a cheap option like Google's Nexus Player? It's only $100, and Android has emulators for quite a lot of older systems. Obviously, it isn't going to handle Blu-rays, but I'm pretty sure you can squeeze something out with the remaining $150-400 in your budget. Heck, at the high-end, you could buy an X1 or a PS4!

 

[SPBHM]

some 10 years ago I had a hacked Xbox for SNES emulation (even some basic N64 emulation was fine, like mario64 was perfect, but more advanced games not), but anyway, if you don't go for anything newer than the SNES anything will do basically, N64 emulation is not perfect with any hardware as far as I know, Dreamcast emulation is OK with core 2 duo, and PS2 emulation is far from perfect and is going to benefit from as fast CPU as you can give (but mostly 2 threads, the g3258 with OC is great for that as far as I know, but I think ps2 emulation is to problematic, compared to how simple SNES emulation is)

I wouldn't go the android route, the options are far more limited... and I had my cortex a9 1.2GHz struggle even with some SNES games, worse than my Pentium 3 PC would do for sure.

 

[Aikouka]

I wouldn't go the android route, the options are far more limited... and I had my cortex a9 1.2GHz struggle even with some SNES games, worse than my Pentium 3 PC would do for sure.

Keep in mind that the Nexus Player does not use ARM. The Nexus Player uses a quad-core Atom CPU (Silvermont). Although, it does use a PowerVR SGX6 GPU. I'm not really sure how that's set up since the only Atom CPU without an Intel GPU costs over $100 as they're server CPUs. The rest of the CPUs all have Intel graphics.

 

[kambam]

Hey guys and ya i will mainly play older emulators but if i can rock some new ps2 games and such i wouldn't mind that either. As for the bluray. No big deal if i have it or not as part of the unit. I actually dont care if its a mini either. My friend has a whole emulator file for NES, n64 etc that he will upload for me. I just need it to work for such gaming and as a browser on the tv mainly for youtube. Found this in a local paper. Would this be ok. Comes with wireless keyboard and mouse

$400 canadian
Model:
HP Compaq 8100 Elite Convertible Mini tower PC

Features:
• 2.80GHz Intel Core i7
• 8GB (2 single 4GB) RAM
• 500GB or 750GB Hard Drive
• DVD/CDRW
• 512 MB Video Card
• DVI /Display/Serial Port
• Windows 7 Pro (COA) + Office 2007 Installed and Activated

 

[kambam]

Or this for $300
Acer X3950 Mini Desktop PC in mint condition, used for daily use including office, gaming or home media center to play HDTV 1080p video.
specification:

CPU: i3 550 3.2GHz (Powerful enough to play or transcode HDTV 1080p video without using too much electronics)
RAM: 6GB
HD: 1TB (Can store a lot of hi-definition videos)
Graphic Card: ATI Radeon HD 5570 with HDMI interface to hook up with your HDTV directly, also powerful enough to play moderate game.
Network: Gigabyte LAN (super fast to play video from NAS, etc.)
DVD: DVD-RW Burner
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate

 

[JeffMD]

Eventually I plan to make an arcade cabinet, and with it I plan to use a more regular processor setup. Probably the fastest i3. Multi core is generally wasted so a high Ghz w/ 2 cores is good enough. With mame you can't really use one of the ~$100 solutions, mame favors accuracy over speed so many arcade games still demand a good cpu. Especially for sound to not suck.

No expansion cards needed, onboard intel video will be enough.

If I was looking at ps2 emulation I would simply do it on my main/gaming PC because you still need to throw every ounce of power at ps2 emulation.

 

[Fox5]

Emulation does benefit greatly from newer architectures, so I would get Haswell if you're doing a high performance build.