Raspberry Pi Forums

Hello all,

Purchased a Raspberry Pi 2 months ago with the intention of building a MAME cabinet around it. However, now I'm concerned that it may not be "powerful" enough to run the arcade games I want. I've heard there can be "lag" and "sluggishness" with the RP2 and MAME based games. I'm wondering if I should build my cabinet around a PC instead. I want to run/play games from arcade games all the way up to sega's dreamcast. I am by no means a programmer or computer engineer, just a weekend warrior who likes to tackle new projects. Any response please use "layman terms" as best as you can. I have built my own PC in the past so I do have some familiarity with the "guts" of a computer. Is it even possible to play some, if not all, dreamcast games on an arcade cabinet with using the joy stick and buttons (not referring to a dreamcast specific controller)? What if the dreamcast games are 2d? Thanks.

Hi,

If you want the best performance, then using a PC rather than a Raspberry Pi would be the way to go.

The PC does not need to be cutting edge, but a decent graphics card will help together with a reasonable amount of RAM, e.g. 4GB (depending on chosen OS).

For example, my aging (10 yrs+) PC using an Intel Q6600 (2.4GHz, quad core), 8GB RAM, AMD Radeon R7 200 2GB RAM graphics card running Fedora Linux is more than capable of handling more demanding emulators such as Mupen64Plus (N64) and PPSSPP (Sony PSP) compared to my Raspberry Pi 3.

Hope this helps,

Neil.

Hello Neil,

Thanks for your quick response. Your reply makes sense and helps, thank you for your honest opinion.

with a rpi2 and the right mame/fba emulator, you can run most 2d arcade games at full speed. there are notable exceptions... mortal kombat series have issue (mk1 should be ok), anything with sprite scaling (afterburner, etc) can struggle.

forget any 3d arcade games.

forget about dreamcast

some n64 games run ok using the right graphics plugin

psx should be mostly fullspeed.

if you manage your expectations, it's fine.