(December 13, 2016 at 12:36 pm)Asmodee Wrote:(December 13, 2016 at 5:47 am)pocaracas Wrote: It is, if its only purpose is to emulate a NES.
But it can to so much more. First, it's not just NES it emulates. It's basically any older gaming system. Buy the right controller and you're set for Atari games of any flavor, Sega, Amiga, Apple II, Commodore 64, old PC and a ton of things I know nothing about. It already has controllers for SNES, which work with NES. It has wifi and bluetooth for connectivity. And all you have to do is swap out the SD card and it's anything you want it to be. If I can get him interested in something other than video games (no luck on that so far) it's a programming lab.
I'm hoping once I tell him what all it can do he'll start looking for himself what he can do with it. It's sort of a learning toy disguised as a game, if that works, anyway. And he's going to freak when he starts playing "Zero Wing" and realizes what game it is when the opening cut scene says, "All your base are belong to us!"
As for leaving it to him to assemble, there isn't much assembly to do. Put the SD card in, snap the board in the case, snap the lid on the case and done. Then you have to get the ROMs on it, which is more boring setup than assembly. I would rather have it just ready to go.
Someone here mentioned Zelda (of course). That's actually why he wanted it. He loves Legend of Zelda games. His cat is named Zelda. He wants to play some of the older games. Now he can play all of the older games.
So, "worth it" really depends on your perspective. $90 to play crappy old games, no. Probably not. But $90 to give my 15 year old son the best present he ever got in his mind, definitely.
igh:It may emulate perfectly up to the N64... but if you already have a desktop or laptop, you already have a machine that's powerful enough to emulate perfectly up to the playstation and gamecube... or even beyond those.
If it's to be a learning tool, you may already have it. Why waste mooneys on an extra device? one that will then call for a bluetooth keyboard and mouse... because you know you'll want those... more moolah!
But yeah, go ahead. The Raspberry Pi is a great little device that can run a full linux distro. I have one running right now, just so I can do ssh tunneling to my home and serve a few media files that I have on a usb stick.
I've tried the XBMC ROM on it and it played 1080p movie files flawlessly. Never did get to try emulators, because... no extra keyboard and mouse... I just used the ones connected to my main desktop computer to set up the Pi and now I only access it via SSH. It has X, so I can even run a web browser on that... but that's slow.
