I have built myself a bartop arcade cabinet and am currently implementing PC-components in the cabinet. A while ago I ran into PIMame and learned it was able to emulate MAME/NES/SNES/Gameboy (my game systems of choice). Now I’m wondering: What is the performance of these emulators? Buggy/slow? Or just normal? Wondering about the experiences you guys have, before buying a Pi. Might be interesting to have a PI instead of all the large PC Components…
I have run a lot of different games on a lot of different emulators contained in pimame and I have to say that they all seem to run pretty darn good. The only one that I every seem to run into any bit of slowdown is the simpsons arcade game. When there are a lot of characters on the screen, it can get a bit dodgy, but not unplayable. I would recommend reading through some of the tutorials to get the RPi settings optimally set to run the games.