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Who makes emulation boxes around here?

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  • Who makes emulation boxes around here?

    I've made a few myself on SBC's but recently I've been working on my first windows based build.

    So far I have successfully swapped the boot up and logon screens, and the PC is booting directly into EmulationStation which is all done up with Retroarch and stand alones, all running perfectly, but, I can't get ES to shutdown the PC.

    It just closes the program and then I have to shutdown the PC. I've change the start button to a space invader so shutdown is a tiny bit more game-ish but having to do a classic PC shutdown, putting down the controller and grabbing the mouse, kind of breaks the whole game machine feel I was going for.

    Also, this is my first time doing a "game machine" kind of build. I usually do themes or genres. Like a Horror themed ES featuring nothing but Horror games, music, and films on a RPi inside a demon skull case. Pokemon theme in a pokeball. Sci-Fi theme in a Millenium Falcon or USS Enterprise. You get the picture.

    For a general and all inclusive game machine design I am kind of stumped. It's got everything from the very early Ataris and Amigas, and Spectrum up to as modern as Wii in it. PC Games run the whole gambit, Dosbox to modern games on Steam. It would be hard to be sure of it, but I think I have the english catalog for all those consoles. Hacks and translations included as best I could.

    Everyone has Kodi running on their system, I don't know what's so hard about using any old media player. It's a PC, it can play any video or music file right out of ES because ES is just a frontend. If it can do it without ES it can do it through ES...So yeah, Netflix, Hulu, Youtube, Spotify, VLC, MP Classic, whatever. What I have loaded is all video games centered...like the FF movie, the SF movie, the Sonic shows, that sort of nonsense, but it can play whatever.

    Just a ****load of comic books as well. Again, focused on game derived stuff so they're mostly very bad comics, but the reader runs great, launches out of ES fine, and is controller driven so doesn't break the feel of the game machine anymore than loading the comic in Shadowhawk the game....on genesis I reckon? Anyway, just like movies I felt no reason to limit it to one player. It can access Comixology and Kindle through ES.

    What shape captures that? What symbolizes video games?

    Presently, it's all in a maple box I cut and screw together in my shop. My power button is an old toggle switch from a ham radio my power light is a green LED I thought was white when I wired it in. I was planning on doing a white LED bending in a prism exactly like the Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon album cover, but since it's green it's just a green light in a maple box.

  • #2
    I don't get the need for an emulation box.

    You can emulate on basically anything.

    My samsung s9 can run every console up to ps2 smoothly.

    I have a laptop with gtx1070 that can run every emulator smoothly. If anything my laptop is already an emulation box. I can stream games or hook it up to a monitor or tv with VGA or HDMi.

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    • #3
      I made my own arcade cab with a raspberry pi 3b+ powering it. Loaded retropie on an old Laptop running ubuntu as well to use as an alternative rig, i went through the stage of putting all the back catalog of the old systems on them but found myself trying to find games to play rather than just choosing something. Currently working through psx games at the mo. tho.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by DARKSEID View Post
        I don't get the need for an emulation box.

        You can emulate on basically anything.

        My samsung s9 can run every console up to ps2 smoothly.

        I have a laptop with gtx1070 that can run every emulator smoothly. If anything my laptop is already an emulation box. I can stream games or hook it up to a monitor or tv with VGA or HDMi.
        I dunno how interested you are in the ins and outs of it so I'll just keep this short but if you wanna know more I'd be happy to explain.

        For people too stupid to figure out emulation. Mostly disc based emulation because just about everyone can handle carts but have I done a few cart-only builds.

        I don't keep my boxes. I make them at cost. So if a fella wants it built on a Raspberry I need 35 bucks and an sd card. Some folks like Android, some folks like Windows, some even want Linux. Doesn't make much difference to me, I'll revamp the OS, restructure the emus, and write bats and configs to make it all run behind the scenes...so to speak.

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