Software Support > GroovyMAME
Why use emulators when theres RetroArch?
donluca:
--- Quote from: abispac on August 30, 2022, 10:11:11 pm ---Well you also have to realize the world is vast and has alot of humans in it.
--- End quote ---
This is the tragedy of modern society which dictates not only how the market works, but also other unrelated stuff which follows the same rules.
Just like electricity, humans will always follow the path of least resistance.
Give them two options, a very easy with a mediocre result and a hard one with excellent result and most of people will always choose the easy one.
Doing things properly require a lot of effort, which demands more "in return", which immediately turns off most people.
So, say, a FPGA developer is looking at a user base of 1000 people whereas Retroarch is looking at possibly 10 times that, if not more.
That alone makes it way more appealing for developers to choose Retroarch rather than FPGA: less work, bigger user base, happier number of users who will benefit from your work.
It's an inescapable cycle.
So what can we do about this?
The only thing we can do is educate people and teach them the differences so that they can make a better choice for themselves, whatever that will be.
MiSTer is not better than a powerful PC with good emulators: it simply has more dedicated people who are decapping real chips and studying them very thoroughly so the result is exceptional. It's as simple as that.
The good thing is that all the cores and documentation are open source and freely available, so hopefully there will be someone at some point who's going to backport all the good work on MiSTer back in MAME and other emulators and, at that point, there will be no almost no differences: MiSTer will have the edge on ease of use, almost instant startup, small, cheaper, vastly lower power consumption and lower input lag.
And that's going to be that.
For someone MiSTer might be more appealing already for the reasons stated above, a bit like how RaspberryPi gained a lot of traction in the retrogaming community, disregarding the more accurate emulation.
Anyway, I'm happy you're going to get a MiSTer and try it out, I'll look forward your thoughts.
MK3FANATIC:
--- Quote ---
Do you know much about RA? It can deliver lower input latency than even the real hardware via run ahead.
I don’t know what other emulators you’re using (Groovymame aside) that you think have less input latency than you can achieve with RA. Seriously.
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Yes I know about the latency features of retroarch. And it was not a conclusion, just my perception and preference. Some emulators I prefer to use standalone instead of retroarch; are PPSSPP, Flycast and Dolphin, not only specifically for input lag, in my setup I feel that the performance in general is better on them than on their respective retroarch cores.
I'm sorry, for the playful way I wrote it (...>...>) it may have given the impression that I consider RA a bad option and that it's always the last choice, but that's not it, quite the contrary, I use it for some systems (where mame still doesn't work) as a first option and it does a great job, especially after adding switchres 2.
abispac:
--- Quote from: abispac on August 30, 2022, 10:11:11 pm ---
Anyway, I'm happy you're going to get a MiSTer and try it out, I'll look forward your thoughts.
--- End quote ---
is gonna take a wild, 200+ dollars is alot of money.
dmckean:
--- Quote from: donluca on August 31, 2022, 09:01:18 am ---The good thing is that all the cores and documentation are open source and freely available, so hopefully there will be someone at some point who's going to backport all the good work on MiSTer back in MAME and other emulators and, at that point, there will be no almost no differences.
--- End quote ---
The MiSTer developers are already getting most of this info from the documentation that was used to write current software emulators. The developers of software emulators just don't consider it worth the effort to implement. It's a ton easier to implement in FPGA because everything can be executed in parallel just like actual hardware. Taking this same approach in software is going to result in something that runs at .2 frames per second.
FPGA modules are going to start showing up in mainstream CPUs in the next several years though. That will change everything.
psakhis:
--- Quote from: dmckean on August 31, 2022, 02:11:01 pm ---FPGA modules are going to start showing up in mainstream CPUs in the next several years though. That will change everything.
--- End quote ---
FPGA's are very expensive...for example we don't see a dreamcast implemented on it.
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