Hello everyone, I am the beloved Xiaoyue. In previous articles, we talked about:
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“Top 6 Must-Buy Cost-Effective Linux Development Boards | OlinuXino Edition”
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“Top 6 Must-Buy Cost-Effective Linux Development Boards | BPI Edition”
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“Top 6 Must-Buy Cost-Effective Open Source Hardware Linux Development Boards | BeagleBone and Cubie Edition”
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“Top 6 Must-Buy Cost-Effective Open Source Hardware Linux Development Boards | Dragonboard and Firefly Edition”
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“Top 6 Must-Buy Cost-Effective Open Source Hardware Linux Development Boards | FriendlyARM Edition”
Hello everyone, I am the beloved Xiaoyue. The May Day holiday is coming soon, and I will be going back to my family again. Of course, the holiday is not the main point; every time I go home, I have to bring some gifts for my nieces and nephews. So, I went to the chipboard warehouse to look for boards suitable for playing retro game emulators (like retropie). The boss recommended Qualcomm Snapdragon boards, which run GBA, PSP, and other emulators smoothly. However, the price of Snapdragon is indeed a bit high. There are many children in my family, and giving gifts would be a loss.
So today, we will recommend some boards that are low in price but high in enjoyment. I found 4 affordable boards that can run retro game emulators, which are Raspberry Pi 3B+, Odroid C2, Odroid XU4, and Orange Pi 3.
Raspberry Pi 3B+
I heard that my uncle and aunt were very good at playing arcade games when they were young, they could play “Dinosaur Battle” all day long, simply a match made in heaven. This excellent gene has also been passed down to my nephew, who can already roll and crawl through Super Mario at the age of 5. So, I want to give him a small computer that can run arcade emulators smoothly.
Of course, each child will get one. I remember playing various game consoles and arcade games when I was a child, and I want to pick up that childhood fun again.So, I also need one for myself, which makes a total of 5. Regarding arcade emulators, there is an open-source software called Retropie, which is a retro game console emulator. Many people have already made game consoles using Raspberry Pi with this software. The method to install retropie on Raspberry Pi can be found on the retropie official website (retropie.org.uk).
I, as a “big customer” purchasing 5 Raspberry Pi 3B+, quickly attracted the attention of the staff at the chipboard warehouse. The staff said that Raspberry Pi fans can enjoy a discount and can have it shipped back home, which is really a great deal.
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Orange Pi 3
Orange Pi is a well-known brand for retro game consoles in China, and anyone who plays DIY arcade games must have heard of various “Moonlight Treasure Boxes” made by Orange Pi One. Today, I bring you the new product from Orange Pi, which is Orange Pi 3.
In terms of firmware, due to the lack of open GPU drivers for Linux, it cannot support the game console firmware RetrOrangePi specifically for Orange Pi, but the Android firmware comes with GPU drivers and can run various Android environment game emulators smoothly, such as the chicken emulator that integrates various retro games.
The key point is the price; this board has a 4-core 64-bit A53 processor, gigabit Ethernet, 5G WiFi, and 4 USB 3.0 ports, but the price is only around a hundred yuan. This is the cheapest 4-core A53 development board in the chipboard warehouse.
The processor chip used in Orange Pi 3 is Allwinner H6, with a 4-core A53 CPU running at 1.8GHz; the GPU specifications are quite high, with a dual-core Mali T720, capable of 70G floating-point operations per second, which is close to the Intel Neural Compute Stick’s 100G floating-point operations per second. The memory and onboard eMMC specifications vary, with a minimum of 1GB of memory and no eMMC (default empty board); the maximum is 2GB of memory + 8G eMMC. The onboard wireless module AP6256 supports 802.11ac (5G WiFi) and Bluetooth 5.0. The specific hardware parameters have been listed at the beginning of this section, so I won’t repeat them here.
This board is recommended for newcomers to purchase in the chipboard’s WeChat store or the official Orange Pi store, where there are newcomer discount coupons; you can’t go wrong buying from here. However, one thing to note is that the Android firmware cannot be written to the TF card using the dd command in Linux or win32diskimager in Windows. You need to use the PhoenixCard software to write it, and the latest version is v4.1.2 software. Additionally, the PWR light on the board lights up after the system starts. If there is no system in the TF or the firmware is written incorrectly, the board will not start and the PWR light will not light up. This is a normal phenomenon, please be aware!
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Odroid-XU4
Odroid’s XU4 actually has two models, XU4 and XU4Q, which have the same hardware specifications; the only difference is the heat sink. XU4 comes with a regular active cooling fan; XU4Q comes with a passive cooling heat sink that is very large to ensure heat dissipation since it has no fan.
The retro arcade software Retropie also supports Odroid XU4, and the Retropie official website has firmware downloads and software installation tutorials. Even more amazing is that the original Ubuntu firmware for Odroid is version 16.04, but the third-party Retropie provides Ubuntu 18.04 firmware; it’s truly a case of “talents among the people”!
In the previous section, we already introduced C2. If you want better 3D gaming performance, you can consider XU4, as the GPU specifications are higher, and the number of GPU cores is also greater. The processor of XU4 is Samsung’s Exynos5422, which includes 4 big A15 cores (2GHz) and 4 small A7 cores (1.4GHz), with a Mali T628 MP6 GPU. It has 2GB of memory and two USB 3.0 ports. It supports gigabit networking, but like C2, it does not have onboard Wi-Fi.
In terms of pricing, XU4 is basically on par with C2, but to avoid affecting C2’s shipment, it is slightly more expensive. C2 can already run various 3D games. If you spend a few more bucks to switch to XU4, it will be more valuable, as the performance can increase significantly. To quantitatively describe this performance improvement, let’s take a look at the unixbench score chart below; the blue bar is Raspberry Pi 3, the green is the previous section’s C2, and the purple is XU4. XU4 really has a significant performance improvement (floating-point calculations even doubled), I can’t believe it is priced similarly to C2.
A major highlight of XU4 is USB 3.0; you can connect an external USB 3.0 hard drive. We tested the performance of the Samsung SSD850PRO solid-state drive on XU4, and the USB 3.0 to SATA chip is JMS567, and we found the read speed is 273MB per second and write speed is 258MB per second. This is a full-blooded USB 3.0 interface, which is worth getting.
XU4’s specific details are as follows:
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Samsung Exynos5422 Cortex™-A15 2Ghz and Cortex™-A7 Octa core CPUs
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Mali-T628 MP6(OpenGL ES 3.1/2.0/1.1 and OpenCL 1.2 Full profile)
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2Gbyte LPDDR3 RAM PoP stacked
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eMMC5.0 HS400 Flash Storage
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2 x USB 3.0 Host, 1 x USB 2.0 Host
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Gigabit Ethernet port
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HDMI 1.4a for display
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Size : 83 x 58 x 20 mm approx.(excluding cooler)
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Power: 5V/4A input
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Linux Kernel 4.14 LTS
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Odroid-C2
Through the open-source software Retropie, many people have already made game consoles using Raspberry Pi. However, the CPU and GPU performance of Raspberry Pi is somewhat weak, and the TF card read speed is also slightly slow, about a little over 20MB per second, which makes loading games a bit slow. Therefore, I want to find a more powerful board for retro game enthusiasts.
In the retro gaming community, it is common to see people buying second-hand S905 set-top boxes to DIY retro game consoles. However, the chipboard warehouse will definitely not recommend those risky second-hand products, so let’s go for a new Odroid C2. The method to install retropie on C2 can be found on the retropie official website (retropie.org.uk).
Odroid C2 uses the Amlogic S905 CPU, a 4-core A53 running at 1.5GHz (faster than Snapdragon 410’s 1.2GHz), integrated with Mali 450 MP2 GPU, and has 2GB of memory. The S905 is one of the few domestic chips with open-source GPU drivers, and the GPU’s Linux driver supports OpenGL 3D acceleration.
The following chart compares the CPU performance of various series of boards, and the testing software is the open-source unixbench; the higher the bar, the better the performance. The blue bar is the familiar Raspberry Pi 3, and the green is Odroid C2.
Some beginners might not have a concept of the above unixbench, so let’s switch to a more popular benchmarking tool, “AnTuTu,” which scores around 30,000 points.
This board’s flash memory supports TF or eMMC modules. For players with limited funds, you can choose to use the TF card as a hard drive. For slightly more affluent players, I strongly recommend buying a 16GB eMMC module, which can achieve a read speed of 125MB per second and a write speed of 124MB per second. This incredible write speed is about 7 times faster than the SanDisk C10 specification TF card (the latest C10’s write speed is around 15.5MB).
I have been very interested in eMMC for a long time; after experiencing the joy of instant game loading, I can no longer wait for the slow speed of TF cards. If I have money, I must buy a board with eMMC.
In terms of appearance parameters, the size of Odroid C2 is consistent with Raspberry Pi. However, C2 does not have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which may not be very convenient for mobile devices (you still need to connect external USB Wi-Fi). However, it has gigabit Ethernet, which is completely sufficient as a desktop gaming machine. It has 4 USB host ports, one HDMI (supports 4K 60Hz), and a 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible interface. The operating system supports Android, Ubuntu, etc.
The specific hardware parameters are as follows:
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