Raspberry Pi a new retro-gaming behemoth?

[DPrinny]

People love good cheap tech (Not talking about Apple fans)

[ulala]

looks great for putting into old console shells for retro goodness

please please let it have 16*9 hdmi output with sound

[DPrinny]

looks great for putting into old console shells for retro goodness

please please let it have 16*9 hdmi output with sound

• 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
• Composite and HDMI video output

I dont think it has

[ulala]

what a shame, it could have been great you know

[speedlolita]

It can play Quake 3 at about 20fps, hardly a retro gaming behemoth - unless you want to only play pre SNES stuff.

[GarryG]

what a shame, it could have been great you know

It does have sound as standard though!

It can play Quake 3 at about 20fps, hardly a retro gaming behemoth - unless you want to only play pre SNES stuff.

I do keep forgetting that some people call things latter than 16Bit 'retro'
32Bit and up will always be the start of modern gaming to me... but that's another thread (and it's already been argued to death!)

A PC with the same specs can easily play SNES games. So I can't see why this ARM chip based board wouldn't. In fact like-for-like it may even do a little better, seing as how it has RISC architecture... not saying this is neceseraly the case though.

[DPrinny]

As long as I can stick it in a Speccy/C64 and it can run them games via emu im a happy chappy

[Havantgottaclue]

10 beta boards have been made and are in the process of being auctioned on eBay. It may interest some people to know how much is currently being bid on these boards, which, let's not forget, are going to be sold for a mere $25 soon:

Beta Board 9
Beta Board 10

Er, blimey.

[psj3809]

That seems ridiculous those prices ! I'm interested in one of these, slap a nice plastic casing on top and it'll be a great little emulator device i reckon but i can quite happily wait 6 or so months for the main production line

[Havantgottaclue]

Yes, absolutely bonkers. Still, the inventors have pledged every penny earned through the auctions for providing Raspberry Pi boards free to schools, so in that respect the huge bids are a very positive thing.

Here's what they said about production in their most recent e-mail to the mailing list: "We have parts in stock for our first 10,000 units, and expect to be in volume production by the end of January."

Hopefully they'll stick to that timetable. I'll be getting one, for sure.

[joefish]

Cheaper than most PIC controllers - would benefit from a cheap USB IO board for driving gadgetry. Most of those are more expensive than the Pi itself.
Anyway, never mind One-Laptop-Per-Child, let's have One-MAME-Per-Telly.

[Havantgottaclue]

Anyway, never mind One-Laptop-Per-Child, let's have One-MAME-Per-Telly.

LOL - my thoughts precisely.

[TMR]

Yes, absolutely bonkers. Still, the inventors have pledged every penny earned through the auctions for providing Raspberry Pi boards free to schools, so in that respect the huge bids are a very positive thing.

i think that's why they've been getting bonkers bids, that and the ten boards are the only ones with the hand-built patch onboard that won't be necessary on the final release.

[joefish]

Cheaper than most PIC controllers - would benefit from a cheap USB IO board for driving gadgetry. Most of those are more expensive than the Pi itself.

Having said that, I see it does have a rack of general purpose I/O pins along one edge for interfacing.
You could probably make up a nice microswitched arcade joystick that plugs straight on to the board.

[DPrinny]

They did say over twitter a few weeks back about a addon board that you can solder what ever you want onto