Emulation boxes

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An emulation box is an unofficial term for a device built with the specific purpose of running emulators. They generally consist of overpriced and locked-down ARM microcomputers and some are more so just "collector's items". They should be avoided as your computer will generally provide better performance overall.

  • NES Classic Edition/Famicom Classic Mini ($59.99) - Official Nintendo product designed to only emulate the NES. Includes 30 games.
  • SNES Classic Edition/Super Famicom Mini ($79.99) - Official Nintendo product designed to only emulate the SNES. Includes 21 games. Uses the same hardware (motherboard, SOC and all) as the NES classic with different firmware.
  • PlayStation Classic($99.99 $40) - Official Sony product designed to only emulate the PS1. Includes 20 games. Uses PCSX-ReARMed as it's emulator.
  • NEOGEO Mini (~$110 $89.99) - Offical SNK product designed to only emulate the NEOGEO. Includes 40 games. Uses a modified version of NJEMU.
  • CAPCOM Home Arcade (~$254) - Offical CAPCOM product designed to emulate CPS1 and CPS2 arcade games. Includes 16 games. Uses FinalBurn Alpha as it's emulator. Schedule to launch October 25th, 2019.
  • Sega Genesis Mini ($79.99) - Official SEGA product designed to only emulate the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. Includes 42 games and is schedule to launch September 19th, 2019. Unlike the other "mini's", this one may offer useless add-ons that are purely for aesthetics and provide no additional features.
  • Retron5 ($159.99) - Emulates NES/GBC/GBA/Genesis/SNES and includes cart readers for those systems.
  • Sega Genesis Flashback (AtGames) - Produced under license from Sega. Emulates the Master System and the Sega Genesis. Very disappointing and the ensuing outcry has led Sega to drop their planned further partnership with AtGames for their actual Sega Genesis Mini.

Controversies

Some of those products have attracted the ire of parts of the emulator community over issues not necessarily related to the product's quality, but ones related to open source emulators. In some cases, it's because negotiations with open source emulator and/or frontend developers fell through and the company used a "lesser" option as a replacement. In others, an arrangement was reached, contracts and money were exchanged only for the project maintainers to turn out not to have gathered the complete consent of all contributors, some parts are licensed as a strictly non-commercial license, and similar issues. Sometimes, it might have to do with an incomplete source code release from companies that have to abide by GPLv3 obligations. And of course, the company might be acting malicious towards emulator developers.

Since the problem with these is primarily a meta problem that doesn't have much to do with the product's actual quality, and is a controversial subject even within emulator developer circles (some well-known developers such as byuu did eventually agree to work with the likes of Hyperkin, after all) this section is about listing some of those cases.

  • Capcom Home Arcade: Capcom has licensed (with compensation) FinalBurnAlpha from the project's maintainer, however this has lead to some controversy and outrage by fellow FBA developers (who didn't agree with this move, and eventually made their own fork) and MAME developers (where some of FBA's code comes from), as FB Alpha's license isn't cleared to allow for commercial use and many of those developers think the FBA's license is an ugly mess of contradicting licenses that should not exist.
  • Retron5 (Hyperkin): Is using RetroArch, Snes9x, Nestopia, VBA-M and Genesis Plus GX. While they did release their source code, the latter four have a non-commercial license. Retroarch's source code used was partial, and had DRM going against GPLv3 obligations.

DIY Solutions

  • Nvidia Shield TV (Android TV box fast enough for 2D & 3D emulation of many consoles)
  • LattaPanda (Windows 10 computer with integrated Arduino. Fast enough for Saturn emulation.)
  • Odroid (Decent speeds for Saturn emulation)
  • Raspberry Pi (Eg. Lakka.)

External Links