I think MVG's point at the end was most important for emulation buyers. Once you buy the active cooler, the unique power supply (highly doubt you have a 5V supply rated for 5A sitting around), and a case - you're entering mini-PC territory and that product segment moves along very fast much like retro handhelds so there's a good chance of something becoming available in your budget if it's not already.

Correction : 6:57 I mean to say PlayStation 2 instead of PlayStation 5

Pi 5 nowadays... while the base price for one is $80, it can go past $150 if you kit it out. Problem with that is, Price to performance just isn't there anymore, once you consider the more recent mini PCs that have exploded onto the market. With not much more money, you could get something much more powerful in comparison. Sure, back in the Pi 2/3 Days, $50 got you a nice little tinker board. But nowadays, It's been harder to justify for the same when faster alternatives exist.

I remember using Raspberry Pi when it first came out, I was amazed with just how powerful it was for its small size. I'm glad they're still going strong

I've been using raspberry pis for several years as a personal server and other as emulation consoles. The problem with these machines is that when you add up the cost of the case, a decent power supply, a quality SD card and a decent fan, to end up with mixed performance for a price close to that of a mini PC, it's not worth it. On top of that, problems with power supply, SD card reliability and the lack of availability of certain ARM-based Linux packages made me decide never to buy one again. I've had an x64 mini PC for 4 years now, and I'll never go back, whatever the performance promised by each new generation.

Those frame rate hitches in Killer Instinct are internal and not the emulation. It’s when the game is reading from it’s hard drive which is why it occurs during transition sequences. I know this for a fact because I owned the arcade game on a super gun for many years

I love how these things were suppose to be $20 and for everyone now they cost a small fortune lol

As much as i love the Pi... for around 100$ there are plenty of used micro PC options out there like optiplex micros with far more processing power

So glad they solved the issue of no being able to buy the 4 by not being able to buy the 5.

Love to see this advancement! Thanks for covering, MVG

great in-depth dive into this new offering. It's everything I've been wondering about it, and I'm glad you covered it!

I love the idea of a Pi, but over the last couple years I just keep coming back to the fact that by the time I add a power supply, case, cooler, storage, etc, I might as well just buy a significantly faster micro PC. You can buy refurbed 9th gen models for $150 or so.

A further note on the power supply - the 5V@5A USB-PD profile it wants is not an official profile. Devices in this power class are supposed to use the 9V@3A profile and include a switching regulator to get whatever voltages they need. However, for whatever reason Pi foundation decided they didnt want to increase the BoM cost or didnt feel they had space on the PCB. This means that none of your USB-C power supplies will work, even if they support 20V@5A. You have to go buy one with the special profile.

I've always been a raspberry pi fan and it's great to see it keep getting better and better. It was my first taste of emulation many years ago. My steam deck is my primary emulation machine now, however if I can find a raspberry pi 5 at a decent price, I would love to tinker with it. Great video as always!

Excellent video, thanks. You really go above and beyond in detail.

I’m glad yt put your channel in front of me. Subbed 🙌🏼

I had a ton of fun emulating stuff on a pi 3 a few years ago. Felt like such an elegant solution at the time even though it was cheap. Now I think emulating on SBCs doesn’t really make as much sense, especially when one of the chinese emulator handhelds with HDMI out is cheaper. The drivers always suck so much on SBCs too

Its an amazing time for emulation and compact systems!!! Use to be youd have to have a full tower, overclocked and loaded to the gills to run half that stuff and at nowhere near full framerate. I've had wallets that were larger than the Pi 5!!!!! This is soo amazing!!!

awesome video, i was definitely interested in this device so this was very helpful!

Great video! Thank you

Man, as someone who's older it's absolutely insane to me how much power we can stuff into SOC's nowadays. Especially considering you can throw a case with a screen, external (or internal I guess) battery and run the thing mobile. I remember when I first bought my Nokia N810 thinking there was no way we'd make substantial improvements from that, yet here we are.

Most big shoot em up have issue on mame in general, mostly input lag. They can run passably with run ahead but most dedicated shmup players run them in custom tweaked mame versions optimized to reduce slowdowns and input lag.

Great to see another MVG video.

That ending song sounded very crisp! Had me dancing!!!

This does look great! If this was released a couple years ago, I'd be all over it. But like you mentioned at the end of the video, I bought a mini PC and I am very happy with the emulation power and performance of that! Pi 5 is cool. Great video!

The most optimistic number I could get was about 250% as fast, but definitely not 250% faster. 150% faster was probably what you meant.But slightly more then double seems to most accurately describe the performance in synthetic numbers.

Thanks! Came for the rasperry pi stayed for the info on emulation. Will try some stuff on muh gaming rig this weekend.

Love that he posted

Just loving the fact you opened the video with Wind Waker. I'm so happy I was never into zelda growing up because right now I'm playing wind waker (on my s21, sometimes in my dex station or on the phones already brilliant screen. With a Xbox controller) and the game is just exceptional especially when I I've got Hypatia's WWHD texture replacement on top With headroom to spare on enabling anti aliasing x2 and X2 internal res. It's just an absolute graphics Spectacle...on my phone 😂

Using up towards 25W.. That's the point where you might consider just getting a NUC, or AsRock A300/X300, and some lower-end Ryzen APU (2200G, 3200G, 4600G, etc). A300 with a 2200G, 32GB RAM, 4x SSD, idled at about 14W.

I got a Beelink SER7 Mini PC for Christmas & it has become my one & only emulation box. I've been able to play PS3, Wii U, OG Xbox, & Switch games at near perfect performance, along with many AAA PC games from the past five years.

So cool to see how far these little SBCs have come.

Thanks for the review MVG. You might be better buying a second hand 7500t or 9500t mini office pc running batocera. It seems like it'll run emulation smoother and costs similar money, especially if you use an ebay coupon etc. The pi5 is expensive here in Aus and I don't see the value proposition. I've bought every main version pi since the first and unfortunately won't be continuing the tradition.

THUMBS UP, $80 dolla holla sounds like a great price. Going to build one for my nephew

Great content 👍

It's crazy for me to think that little device is more powerful than the computer I had a bit over 10 years ago.

these are cool for people with a pathological need for the smallest possible computers. go just a bit bigger and the performance gets really insane.

New MVG vid?! I understand only surface knowledge tech but I’m here to nod my head and agree like I’m part of the group! Let’s go!

Likely issue with KI/KI2 is I/O speed. The transitions and such in KI are streamed off the game's "hard drive" so if that is slow, the game will stutter even if it's being rendered at 60 fps.

It's a little powerhouse, my brother got my son one of those for Christmas. My son uses it to play Minecraft and it does it pretty well.

My problem with the raspberry pi4 was essentially that while the console emulation often worked well, TV emulation shaders were often too slow for realtime..

Well, my 8GB Pi 5 only games with network packets. It's being used as a router in addition to running some VMs and torrenting to it's M.2 SSD. But still, it's nice to see what this tiny board is capable of. Heck, with a big NVME drive, you could fill it with bajillion ROMs and have yourself an great all-rounder emulation box. As for cooling, the active cooler fan is silent but pretty weak at it's job. Since I have a lot of spare fans, I dropped on a temperature controlled 92mm 12v fan. It's a grand overkill but keeps both the Pi 5 and it's attached USB network interfaces (3 on USB 3.0 and 1 on USB 2.0) nice and chilly.

I had a Pi 3 back in the day, best part of that was that you could put it in your pocket with a small frame controller and its adapter, and you could have a portable gaming console wherever you had a TV or a monitor. I used to bring that to work on night shifts and play games on my free time.

I had a Pi 3+ then got a 4, but decided this time to go down the mini pc route (Trig Key) as wanted to emulate switch and similar demanding systems without issue.

For the parts you find slowdowns you could report a bug to mesa. RPI5 drivers is too new to know if you are hitting a driver bug or a hardware limitation.

great vid, the active coolers are realy good except they are quite tricky to get out of the box 😋❤️

1:28 mah boy you were STRUGGLING there lol

The Pi's been popular as an emulation board, but it's never been a very good solution. Because the series of chips its used are meant for (and primarily used in) set-top boxes so the VideoCore "GPU" series has always been first and foremost a video decoder. There's always been much better solutions with similar chips meant for smartphones and tablets with much more capable GPUs like the ODroid and Orange Pi series. I really wish people would look at those instead when building emulation boxes...

It's funny to me how I associate pi with a barebones system so each time I get baffeled by people emulating on it. Really love the videos!

Big thumbs up for testing Killer Instinct! Still hoping for a perfect MiSTer core.

Many seem to place performance or more features up there above everything else. For me it is a balance of features, performance, flexibility, community support, wide range of add-ons and software that make the real total package. I was so close to getting an Orange Pi 5 or 5 Plus or even diving into a RISC V setup, but the factors I mentioned were the deciding reason in the end for upgrading to the Pi 5.

If you wanted an emulation box I'd rather invest in a Ryzen based miniPC, 8-core zen4 with rdna3 graphics and ddr5 memory is just awesome. Way more pricey, but you get a modern x-86 cpu on 4nm lithography with all of the efficiency and software support that comes with it. Heck, you could play modern games on those things, nevermind emulation. Pies aren't really ideal for gaming because arm.

An "$80 Gaming Beast"... ... That you have to buy a cooler for... ... And a power supply for... ... That seemingly can't run most GameCube games at native res at full, stable speeds... There are full portable systems like the Retroid Pocket 4 that come with everything you need, can play almost all PS2 games at 2x resolution at full speed, and which cost only a fraction more than the Pi after you add up everything you need, so i have no idea where all the praise for this system is coming from.

The Raspberry Pi line of hardware makes me feel so old. Like when I was so young(er) and I remember messing with the 1 came out, I was so excited for the 2, and then it came, then I forgot, and the 3 came out, then the 4, and now the 5 lol.

I had a RP4 and after I saw the price of the RP5 after the case, fan, and everything it came out to basically the same as a Beelink S12. I didn't need the headers since I still have the old RP4 if I need to tinker, so I bought one of those and it's been great. It's not much bigger than the RP, has 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVME, N100 processor, and an Intel UHD Graphics 750. Compared to most of the statistics I've seen, it's double the benchmarks of the RP5. It could easily be a dedicated emulation machine, or be capable of running 2 or possibly even 3 docker containers simultaneously depending on what you need to run.

I hope our local shops have the 8G model back in stock soon. Then again, I might just as well get an Intel N100 mini PC and get the same.

Spent hours playing with PS2 emulation on Pi5 and found the RK3588 (or step up to the X1) to be a better option If you want to keep it strictly SBC. Regardless of SBC used however (& not really discussed or shown here) majority of ps2 games need unique tweaks and config setup to run & half of the Aethersx2 settings have zero input and will lock up/crash the pi5. Dropping in a PS2 ISO and just being able to play it won't happen often.

So glad they kept the composite video output. It's not as clean as component, but wonderful for gaming using with CRT TV's.

Perfect Timing I got my pi 5 in the mail today.

I've mucked about with Pis a bit, they are perfect if a tiny form factor is essential but otherwise I have given up and sold them, you'll spend most of your life being slightly dissapointed with performance and trying to tweak that extra bit out of it, when really you get a hell of a lot more power and flexibility (Lakka, Batocera, Linux, Windows etc) with a cheap used small form factor (SFF or USFF) PC for around the same money or even less. The great thing is offices get rid of them by the truck load! IF you must have new hardware, the latest budget Intel chips like the new N100 are also substantially more powerful than a Pi and extremely cheap in new mini PC packages, for what they are capable of.

If you can buy it for that price...

will be worth revisiting this in a couple of years to see how it's all matured.

i put a pi4 years back in my arcade one up and preforms beautifully till this day.

So far I am very happy with recalbox on the rpi5. My rpi 5 is blowing everything away i throw at it

Thanks for the video. What mini PC would you recommend?

783k subscribers So happy for you man. I love this channel. So much interesting content

The cave shooter issue might be a refresh mismatch? I.E. the arcade is emulated in something like 57 hz matching the original, but is displayed at 60hz on the Pi introducing some choppiness.

I was a raspberry pi fan especially with the 3B stuff as it was cheap and cheerful but I think there are better and more options now. My preferred solution atm is Xbox Series X and dev mode for Dolphin/PS2 and a frontend app like Launchpass. I don't think I will buy a PI5, I do still have the 3B and a Pi 400 though to tinker about with...

I can't believe Pi5 now can do PS2 emulation...thats amazing! I have a 3B+ and its pretty neat, awesome to see this tech growing. As for cooling, they have RGB coolers now and you know RPi AIOs are next lol

Great video! You could compare switch emulation (ryujinx and yuzu)! It would be nice to see if there are any advantages compared to emulators for older consoles because the Switch also has an arm64 cpu. At least Ryujinx has to be compiled for linux arm64 afaik

The Pi was cool a decade ago but with the relase of mini PCs, it's pretty much DOA when it comes to emulation performance. Any cheap Ryzen Mini PC will crush this and by the time you buy all the Pi accessories, you're better off spending a bit more for a MIni PC.

Nice to see scalpers still have the market cornered. None of the official shops have Pi 5s available still, and I’ve been checking every couple months. I guess the good news is that Pi 4s are widely available again now that scalper bots aren’t hammering these sites the minute they go on sale.

It's crazy to me that they would be dumb enough to expect 5v at 5A. At that point just implement proper USB-C power delivery standards and accept 12v (or maybe even 20v).

Wasn't killer instinct arcade a machine with a mechanical hard drive in it that had the video stored on it. Maybe those skips are to do with the data retrieval and the draw is not affected. Don't know. Great video as always ;-)

Literally just got my pi4 today. Any chance of a twister OS video as I love your content and you would do a much better video with all the others out there 😊

The problem for me is that the Raspberry Pi used to be a CHEAP Linux computing solution. Having to get a powerful enough power supply as well as the cooling makes this like everyone has said, something that is now mini-PC range, and there are many better and cheaper options if you're looking to do emulation. They need to cater towards the original crowd, where it's a very inexpensive yet robust computing solution. The ability to run X11 and such in the beginning was a nice-to-have, not a necessity, but now they are pushing towards the higher powered graphical-centric path, which would be great if they were still selling at really low prices - but they are not, in fact mostly the opposite.

Unfortunately the RK3588(S) based systems aren't in the same price-range, but the GPU is better suited for emulation of newer 3D consoles. (Except the Dreamcast which emulates great on almost all newer Arm based systems) If there ever will be a 'ShieldTV II' that probably will be awesome for it!

Liking the house-y background music

I'm waiting excitedly for the Compute module version of this, as pairing this with a 20-30 buck used and GPU could be amazing.

I wouldn't call it a beast, but it's fine for emulation of older consoles and arcade games.

For emulation/gaming, I'd go for a mini PC over a Pi5 any day. Especially if you have to buy all the extra stuff you need to get the most out of the Pi5. For the price of a fully kitted out Pi5 you can get a mini PC that will run rings around the Pi5 in terms of processing power. I just don't see the value proposition in the Pi5 anymore, unless you really feel the need to tinker with the latest version. Not when you can get a N100 system for less than 150 bucks. Some go as low as 100 bucks, depending on where you live and what deals are available locally.

1:31 Love the struggle with the stubby fingers.

Regarding your discussion at about 13:00, it could be related to "99th percentile" frame rates. Even if it looks like its always at 60fps, if one in every 100, or one in every 20 frames is slower than that, it shows a very noticable drop in visual performance, while not being apparent when just looking at a framerate counter

We are at the point where you need to run PS2 for at least a 150 bucks flawlessly

I found the PSP emulation with the pi4 was completely unisable with any game, even with no up scaling. Even overclocked it couldn’t run something like Pac-Man at more than 10fps with the sound glitching. I have a couple of Pi5s now that I’ll be using to replace the pi4 in my media centre/retropie setup.

Great video. I understand that performance verses cost and if you are wanting better quality then a mini pc is better. But once you get there with the hardware, where do you get the games? Do you have to rip all the roms from your old cartridges and play them or do you have to pay steam to play them?

I'm more hoping if they make a compute module version that you may install in a handheld kit. There the form factor limitations would make sense unlike with mini PCs.

I think RK3588 boards like the Orange Pi5 represent much better value for money. I think the days of the Pi's dominance in this space are coming to an end. The only thing keeping it hanging on at this point is community support honestly.

If you can get one... out of stock for months and reservation for months.... :( definitly a beast for sure

Great content, any thoughts on reviewing mini-pcs for 2024?

Hello, first time viewer. Not used to having a gamer older than myself. Watching a few of these emulation videos, it seems that it is almost easier to just play on the original systems. In terms of space, it seems Raspberry Pi might be a decent option. I've kept all my systems growing up so I often wonder if it's the way to go.

With all the add ons needed to get all the power out of the RPi 5 you’re getting into Mini PC price territory.. and you can probably find a mini PC around the same price that runs better and has more support for programs. I use to love Raspberry Pi’s. Back when their top model was still pretty cheap it made for a decent little cheap emulation box. I still use my RPi 4 once in a while. But going forward (personally) I just don’t see the value for what you get anymore.

This is very well timed , my dad keeps getting these rubbish retro game machines from Amazon and I am thinking of just making a retro pi up for him

Might want to recheck your measuring tools, Daytona on Saturn runs at around 20fps (and it looks like the emulation is doing that too)

Being able to play PS2 (and Gamecube) makes this a gamechanger for me. So many games I used to play with my friends can now be played by a Raspberry behind my TV.

But can it run KZfaq?

I don't think we've seen the max potential from the 5 yet. Too early IMO

2:50 Now that is what I call a Clean Hud like holy shit this is Perfect

I love these Raspberry units, and I'll tell you why. Because, years ago, we used to all go down the arcades, and we ploughed pounds into arcade machines every weekend. Then consoles came along and, more or less, killed off the arcades, as well as the arcade gaming community along with it, and we were a community, where everyone knew everyone. Instead of going to the arcade at the weekend, we all turned more inward and went round our mates house instead to go on their Snes. The arcade machine games almost died a death. Since the Raspberry units came along, there has been a resurgence in the selling of Bar Top Arcade Machines. Now, we can all have a Bar Top Arcade Machine in our bedroom, for several hundred pounds, with several thousand games loaded on to it. This Raspberry PI system has completely, almost on it's own, revitalised the retro gaming genre, helping to keep games that I haven't played for almost 20 years alive. Games like Ghouls 'N Ghosts, Toki, Strider and Final Fight. For that, for their service to the longevity of retro arcade machine gaming, I will always be grateful. Without systems like the Raspberry PI, the arcade game genre could have died a death a decade ago. I fully intend to buy a Raspberry PI based Bar Top Arcade at some point in the future. The reason why I don't have one now though, is because I have my Steamdeck right now. Otherwise, a Bar Top Arcade, powered by a Raspberry PI 5, would be on the cards.

RP has gone a long way and its also gotten a bit expensive. In my country it's more practical to grab a used Dell Optiplex or HP EliteDesk and get more out of it.