Emulation station with a pi 4 8GB

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Das Troll
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Emulation station with a pi 4 8GB

Post by Das Troll » Fri Feb 19, 2021 12:59 am

I've been playing with gigantic pi images that load a bunch of systems onto one big image, trick it out with chiptunes and images, then post them online.

https://www.arcadepunks.com/download-ra ... -4-images/

This site right here has the images. Word of warning though, they are gigantic and ran with torrents where people are not incentivized to seed. So make sure you don't allow it to eat up all your bandwidth by limiting your upload speed.

Things needed:

A pi 4 with cords and cables (don't be a cheap ass and get the low end. Get the 8GB one)
Biggest micro sd you can find. 500+GB
a GOOD micro SD writer (this is important)
a joystick of some type (xbox controller is plug N play)
an image writer like balena Etcher

First get yourself a torrent downloader and download the image of your choice. The bigger the image, the longer shit takes. You can get some good speeds on the torrents if you're lucky but that's where the real time sink begins. I'm not sure why, but the 500GB image I got has been extracting from a .RAR file for 24 hours now and its only 20% done. That's fine though, I'm in no real hurry. Once that big bastard gets done, get your GOOD microSD writing hardware and write the image to the SD card. A good writer is important here because if you get a cheap Chinese piece of shit, it will error out in the massive amount of time it takes to write to the SD card. It takes less time if your device is USB 3 so again, don't be a cheapskate.

Bottom line, you'll probably be spending about 200 bucks on this whole setup. But what a setup it is. Tons of games, tons of systems from way down in the 8 bit days to the Nintedo 64 and PS1 days. There's a reason why the files are so big. So if you want a ton of games on a ton of different platforms all crammed onto a SD card thats stuffed into a PI, well this is the thing for you.

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Enigma
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Re: Emulation station with a pi 4 8GB

Post by Enigma » Fri Feb 19, 2021 7:37 am

I remember having a goal to pirate every Dreamcast game and have it on a burned disc back when it was relevant, and my buddy and I did the math and found out it would be a few hundred GB, which, now a days isn't terrible, but back then would have been an entire hard drive plus some.



Aaaand now I feel old because my first real PC had a whopping 10GB hard drive (my mom paid extra for that), 64mb of ram, a Pentium II processor, and 8mb of shared video memory capable of 3DFX, and now I'm over here shitting because my 2tb hard drive is only 1.8tb
:weed: [IP: logged]

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