There’s nothing wrong with wanting to stick to original hardware, if you already have it or can afford to buy it.
Setting up a Pi or other single-board system as a dedicated retro game emulator is also an absolutely valid choice IMO. It’s a fun, generally affordable little project that you can tinker with forever, e.g. changing cases and controllers, UI tweaks, ROM file organization, per-game settings optimization. But I don’t think that it’s ever been the “best” emulation option for anyone who didn’t already have their heart set on “doing something fun and interesting with a Pi”.
The smartphone you already have, dedicated retro gaming handhelds, Android TV boxes or sticks, and cheap/secondhand/already-owned PCs (desktop, notebook, or kiosk) all arguably match or exceed the performance and value-for-money of any Pi-based system.
Yet in any thread where someone new to emulation is asking for advice, there’s always a flock of folks who suggest getting a Pi like it’s the only game in town. It honestly baffles me a little. Especially because almost all of them are just running a pretty frontend over Retroarch, and Retroarch is available for virtually every modern consumer computing platform (and so are a lot of pretty frontends, if that’s a selling point).
For context, I’ve got a dozen or so retro systems, but I prefer to emulate as much as possible.
Emulation is nice because it removes a lot of the friction between deciding I feel like playing a given game and actually playing it. Dealing with worn out controllers, dead parts, wonky connections just to squint at a fuzzy screen. I much prefer seeing it upscaled on my modern screen and grabbing whatever controller is convenient to play with
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to stick to original hardware, if you already have it or can afford to buy it.
Setting up a Pi or other single-board system as a dedicated retro game emulator is also an absolutely valid choice IMO. It’s a fun, generally affordable little project that you can tinker with forever, e.g. changing cases and controllers, UI tweaks, ROM file organization, per-game settings optimization. But I don’t think that it’s ever been the “best” emulation option for anyone who didn’t already have their heart set on “doing something fun and interesting with a Pi”.
The smartphone you already have, dedicated retro gaming handhelds, Android TV boxes or sticks, and cheap/secondhand/already-owned PCs (desktop, notebook, or kiosk) all arguably match or exceed the performance and value-for-money of any Pi-based system.
Yet in any thread where someone new to emulation is asking for advice, there’s always a flock of folks who suggest getting a Pi like it’s the only game in town. It honestly baffles me a little. Especially because almost all of them are just running a pretty frontend over Retroarch, and Retroarch is available for virtually every modern consumer computing platform (and so are a lot of pretty frontends, if that’s a selling point).
For context, I’ve got a dozen or so retro systems, but I prefer to emulate as much as possible.
Emulation is nice because it removes a lot of the friction between deciding I feel like playing a given game and actually playing it. Dealing with worn out controllers, dead parts, wonky connections just to squint at a fuzzy screen. I much prefer seeing it upscaled on my modern screen and grabbing whatever controller is convenient to play with