Pi replacement??

[fireslayer26]

Has anyone seen this? Maybe an upgrade to the Raspberry Pi for RetroPie??

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/802007522/up-intel-x5-z8300-board-in-a-raspberry-pi2-form-fa?ref=discovery

[herbfargus]

Looks a lot more expensive, lacks the community support like the raspberry pi has, and has only 16GB embedded memory.

May run games faster provided they work on the processor.

Interesting product for sure but looks just like another raspberry pi clone to me.

[epe9686518]

Umm hate to say it but this actually looks pretty incredible, specially for something like retropie….Calling this “just another raspberry pi clone” and simply writing it off as such is doing it a huge disservice…..

First off, the CPU being a Intel Cherry Trail Atom Quad Core x5-Z8300 64 bits up to 1.84GHz is vastly more powerful than the Pis 1000 Mhz ARM cpu…

2nd, where this really truly shines is in the GPU. The Intel Gen 8 HD with 12 Execution Units up to 500MHz is wayyyyyyyy better than what the Pi 2 has under the hood. SO much so that you can run 4k video on this with no problem.

Yes it “only” comes with a 16gb eMMC card for internal storage but that can be upgraded to a 32GB eMMC card… Either way, thats way more space then you need to get a OS image on the system, and games could easily be offloaded to a large flash drive or usb HDD….

So what would this mean for games? A heck of a lot! With this hardware, you would be able to run every game system the PI can and a ton more. You could easily run the current version of mame and have most of the games work now… You could run Dreamcast in HD with no issue. Even PS2 and GC/WII games should work just fine on this.. Systems like PSX and N64 could now be run in HD at full speed, with lots of filters to greatly improve the graphics of those systems….Even Arcade systems like Sega Model 2 arcade hardware should run well on this…

More exciting yet is this supports Android and Windows and Linux… You could easily run all of the Android games at full speed in max resolution with no issues what so ever…On top of that, Android has all of the emulators and those should work great out of the box…Then you got Windows, with this hardware it would open up a ton of PC games that would be playable on this as well…

Saying this “lacks the community support” that Pi has is basically taking things completely out of context. This doesn’t even come out to the public until Feb 2016, and the first kits don’t even ship to Dec, which would be the first time the actual community would get access to the hardware…. So of course it’s not going to have anywhere near the same community support as Pi out of the gate… but the exciting thing is it’s got a ton more power but all in the same size device as Pi, and out of the gate you can load up emulators and start playing retro games as well as Android titles…

This to me seems like a perfect platform for EmulationStation… and considering it already supports windows, that means you can run EmulationStation out of the box on this…

I totally will be supporting this Kickstarter and will be testing out this hardware for sure!

[illuminerdi]

Too expensive for too little, IMO. Sure it’s nice and the form factor is small, but it’s barely less expensive than some of the lower end Intel NUC models.

While a unit like this might be powerful enough to emulate just about everything up through the Dreamcast, the price point doesn’t justify what amounts to the ability to play a few more N64 games. PSX is almost 100% solid on the RPi 2, and this thing is not remotely powerful enough to emulate any/many PS2 or GCN games, so you end up paying $60 USD for a minor increase in the overall supported games list.

Not trying to rain on anyone’s parade. If you like this then by all means, back it – the more maker boards out there, the more makers and the more community we have, I just personally don’t see the benefits here.

IMO a better option would be for RetroPie to add support for something like the Odroid C1+. This is a Quad-Core 1.5ghz ARMv7 board with the exact RPi form factor and a Mali 450 graphics chip (which is probably at least on part with VC IV, if not better).

In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting one of these just to see if I could hack RetroPie into working on it. I can’t see it being that difficult to accomplish – mostly I’d just need to alter Retropie’s boot config to load the Mali 450 module instead of Videocore IV.

[dankcushions]

i think the community thing is so important. the pi was the first of its kind and had huge hype, even as far as international news. that following has carried it forward to selling huge numbers, and spawned projects such as this.

i’d love a more powerful system and i think with retroarch support you’d have almost all you needed for emulation, but i wonder if it would be as ‘fun’ without this sort of community helping out, and being there to help?

i think a pi 3, with a GLES2 GPU and a better CPU, would be awesome, though!

[epe9686518]

[quote=109579]Too expensive for too little, IMO. Sure it’s nice and the form factor is small, but it’s barely less expensive than some of the lower end Intel NUC models.

While a unit like this might be powerful enough to emulate just about everything up through the Dreamcast, the price point doesn’t justify what amounts to the ability to play a few more N64 games. PSX is almost 100% solid on the RPi 2, and this thing is not remotely powerful enough to emulate any/many PS2 or GCN games, so you end up paying $60 USD for a minor increase in the overall supported games list.

Not trying to rain on anyone’s parade. If you like this then by all means, back it – the more maker boards out there, the more makers and the more community we have, I just personally don’t see the benefits here.

IMO a better option would be for RetroPie to add support for something like the Odroid C1+. This is a Quad-Core 1.5ghz ARMv7 board with the exact RPi form factor and a Mali 450 graphics chip (which is probably at least on part with VC IV, if not better).

In fact, I’ve been thinking about getting one of these just to see if I could hack RetroPie into working on it. I can’t see it being that difficult to accomplish – mostly I’d just need to alter Retropie’s boot config to load the Mali 450 module instead of Videocore IV.

[/quote]

I think your vastly under-estimating the power of this device… This wouldn’t simply allow us to play a “slight number” of new games… It would vastly increase the number of games we could play by 1000s… This would be able to run a modern version of MAME at full speed on most of those games, that alone would add a quite a few 1000 more games that we could now play that we weren’t able to before…

And yes the PSX emulation on PI is pretty much 100% full speed….. At low resolution with no advanced filtering or FSAA…Using this, you should be able to now run them at 720p or 1080p with high levels of FSAA and AF filtering that makes a massive difference in the level of detail of the games. You could also do this for N64, so not only would pretty much all N64 games run on this now at full speed, but you could again run them in much higher resolution and add the advance filtering to the games which greatly improves the graphics… So your not only adding more compatibility with games, you are greatly improving the look of the games too… So basically you wouldn’t just be getting access to more games with this, a lot more, those games would be at a much better level of quality too… For what comes down to a small overall increase in money…

We will never have a better bang for your buck than the Raspberry Pi, that is for sure. The amount of performance you get out of the Pi2 vs the price will probably be unbeatable.. That being said, a lot of us would love more games, at better quality going forward, and devices like UP are all possible options.

The one I supported and am looking forward to testing very soon is MagicStick.

This device, which will hopefully start shipping to backers in Dec, features a quad-core Intel Cherry Trail Z8300 Processor at 2.4GHz, 16 core Intel GPU, 8 GB of ram etc….This is basically quite a good PC in something roughly the size of the Pi. This not only has enough power and ram to run pretty much every emulator out there, at high resolutions with full filters and advanced effects… It also will be able to run a wide rage of PC games and PC apps as well as Android games…

Now the retail price is going to be $399 when its released, which is high, but again this is a full PC in something the size of a credit card…For those of us looking for better emulator support and performance but in a small form factor that is very portable this is quite exciting…I backed this and got one for $250 which I think is an incredible price for this device… I would like to see it retail around there to $300 range but maybe down the road…I am going to be running a lot of tests on this going forward to see what is possible on it.. Having full emulation of every system out there as well as a full desktop PC, complete with all apps and games, would be quite amazing!

[chito]

bottom line question: Is the price of this board worth looking to? Im guessing that even if this board cost 4x as much there are people who will still want it since the size of project is a bigger factor. the hobby factor and cost effectiveness was what attracted me, no harm blowing up a $35 board

[dabone]

I’d just love to see an x64 or x86 version of retropie.

That way the people that wanted to have the much more expensive setups could do it
easily.

Later,
dabone

[herbfargus]

You can accomplish essentially the same thing with emulationstation for windows:

[Author]

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