Reply To: Curvature/CRT-simulation on A+, possible?

[jarkokoo]

I don’t mean to troll or anything, but if you REALLY are after a genuine CRT-look and extra bells and whistles, you have to invest some more money to your project.

For MAME + HLSL most of the small form factor PC’s around 300e/$/250£ will do, especially, if you’re willing to drop the desktop resolution to 900p – it really doesn’t show on MAME’s picture quality, but shows on performance, when the shaders are run. For example my ASUS VM42 runs MAME with HLSL enabled at full 100% speed, when I dropped the resolution to 900p, and it looks beautiful. But a good thing to remember is, that this kind of system is only suitable for 2d-stuff in MAME, so no Rival Schools or Radiant Silvergun.

For 3d stuff, in MAME or, if you want to emulate Wii or similar or RetroArch with shaders you’ll need a “real” computer, with a dedicated decent GPU. In most cases the 3d-era systems’ emulation and the shaders in RA are just so demanding. So, if you want to have it all: you have to buy a real rig, that runs your emulation project.

For other individual emulators with shaders: you just have to try. But the bottom line is: with a cheap system, like RPi or even a small form factor PC/HTPC, you just have to let some features go. In RPi environment it mostly means: no shaders at all, at least not at this particular moment.