(video game sounds) (relaxed music)
- [Bryan] So today at Tech YES City
I'm gonna be building my first emulation PC,
where its sole purpose is to run some old school games
and one in particular that I'm looking forward to playing
is X-Men vs. Street Fighter.
I actually used to play this religiously
at the arcade machines when one of my friends
worked there and he pretty much just
hit the credit button for us
and, you know, you'd just keep playing the game all day
and in order to do this we're gonna be using
the Ryzen 3400G and a Mini-ITX motherboard
as well as putting an NVME on the back
and some good memory and also water-cooling it
inside this little case here.
This is the H100 from Cooler Master.
Now, when I first got this case in,
Cooler Master sent it over and I looked at it
and there's actually not a whole lot
you can do with this thing.
It's actually a little bit of a weird design
where the front of the case hangs out
around 60 mil and instead of making it hang out so far
they could have reduced this size and expanded the inside
a little bit and then you would be able to fit
cards in here like RTX 2060's for example and RX580's.
Now also another thing about this case
is before we begin the build, is for the Mini-ITX solution
they've gone with the idea of putting in a full sized
power supply, which kind of does defeat the purpose
of Mini-ITX in some ways
but in this case, I thought about it
and I'm like, well we're gonna turn this weakness
into a strength by using a Bangjob Dell
300 watt power supply and since we're using an APU build,
it's not going to sip up much power at all
so the benefit of that is we're gonna save a lot of money
and then we can use this power supply
that pretty much wouldn't be good
for any of the gaming builds I do on the channel here
'cause I need PCIe six pin power,
especially if it's something like an RX570
but on the other hand it's also got very short cables,.
Which again will be perfect in something like this.
So this is pretty much gonna be a win for guys like me
who delve into these fort of OEM's all the time
and you've got some spare parts aside
and you wanna put together a little home theater PC
or in this case, the emulation master.
(upbeat rock music)
(video game sounds)
So this took me so long
to eventually set all this up and get it working
and so this part of the video
is actually gonna be a bit of a tutorial
on how to set up an arcade emulation system
on Windows 10, and of course extract a lot of benefits
out of a little small PC like this.
Now the good news is, is my little like,
I think I got this for 10 or 15 dollars ages ago
when I was in Japan used parts hunting
and the good this is this works perfectly
with the emulation software so I'm actually gonna go
through a few things.
What I did first was I tried installing
a front end called Retro FE
and this was getting rave reviews.
I'm sure it's a good program and it looks really nice
but for me personally, it required a lot of work and effort
to try and get working and I spent a lot of time on it
and in the end it eventually just ended up crashing out
every time I tried to boot up a game
and so I asked one of my friends and he said
take a look at Retro Arch
and then we decided to download this
and once you download this, you go to the website,
I'll put the links in the description below
for some of this stuff to get you guys stated
because ultimately you're going to have to have
your own ROM's and that's a different story
on how you get your ROM's and what you do with your ROM's
that's up to you but get Retro Arch,
download this if you're like me
and you're new to this whole arcade thing,
install it and then once you open up the program
which will be in the root directory
you then go to the core updates
and you have to install all the core
Libretto DLL's I think they call them?
And so they're actually attached to Retro Arch directly
so once you download all these core components,
I just decided to download every single one of them,
you can then update the whole architecture as well
and also update the core updaters any time you wish
in this program, so it's actually
a really powerful front end, Retro Arch,
and after we did that we decided to go all the way over
to the Scan Directory so once you've sort of
got this whole platform installed,
all the core update files are there and ready to go,
you can then go to Scan Directories
and this is where you're going to have to place your ROM's
wherever you put them,
you can click Enter, and by the way,
if you're on a keyboard and mouse
the easiest way to navigate through this
is just Enter and Backspace,
so Backspace will go back, Enter will go forward
and if you hit Escape, that'll actually
quit the whole program all together.
So once you've got your ROM's ready,
and as we said before, wherever you get your ROM's from
I don't care, I don't wanna know about it,
but get your ROM's and then go to Scan Directory
and this will take a quite a while.
So what's it doing after this is it's attaching
all your ROM files to the Retro Architecture platform
and so once you've finished scanning all your directories
you can then go into Retro Arch
and then you should be able to boot up most games
and they should work perfectly fine.
I started playing some Mega Man 3
and I was absolutely over the moon, I loved it so much.
Especially playing Mega Man 3 on a joystick,
which is something I've never done before
and it's a lot of fun
and it sort of brought a whole new life to retro games.
So within Retro Arch itself you can configure
your joystick to work and what you do here
is depending on the amount of buttons you have,
you may have to leave a lot of binds empty,
which is what I did because I've only got six buttons
and then I've got two buttons up here
for optional, you know, that's Start and Select.
So I went through and just did the initial ones
which is what it does first of all,
so if you got to all user binds under the username
and I'll just show you guys with the video.
You can then start to program
your up, down, left, right and all your A, B,
circle and triangle and R1, R2, L1 and L2 buttons
and then after that essentially I left
all the other keys blank 'cause I didn't have them
and then pretty much, I booted up games
and this profile was saved
and I could play my games absolutely fine.
So that was really good news.
Retro Arch was working close to perfect
and I'm gonna stop here and say close to perfect
'cause as we said in the intro,
I wanted to play some X-Men vs. Street Fighter
and this game me,
this is the next part of the build,
that gave me a lot of headaches
because I tried booting this up with Retro Arch
and it just wouldn't work at all
and then I tried it with Retro FE, didn't work at all.
I even tried it directly with MAME
and this is when I started to realize,
Okay if MAME directly can't run X-Men vs. Street Fighter
I know something else is going on
so I started researching it and apparently
the Capcom games have their actual own emulator
and it's called the CPS1 and CPS2
and so what you've gotta do for this,
I got a program called WinKawaks 1.65
and I'll put the link for this in the description too
where you can download this program
and then you can put the X-Men vs. Street Fighter ROM
inside the CPS1 directory here
and then you can open this program
and go to Load Game and then you can scan for the ROM
and it should find it
and then you can boot it up via this program
and just like Retro Arch you can set
the joystick manually within the game
and it will remember it and so this was just
a lot of fun, getting back to X-Men vs. Street Fighter
for me personally was just a blast to the best,
I used to love this game
and so that pretty much does it for getting your head around
emulating those older ROMS, Nintendo64,
Nintendo Sega Mega Drive arcade games on the PC.
So there's two programs or platforms
that I use to do this.
One of them being Retro Arch, which is
the majority of the titles
and the next being WinKawaks
and that did an absolutely great job.
I'm now playing my games, enjoying them
and the one title as I said in the intro
that I really wanted to play was X-Men vs. Street Fighter
because I haven't played this for like,
19 years I think now.
And back in the day my two favorite characters
were Cyclops and Sabertooth in a combo
and Sabertooth was just so kickass,
he could do this combo where you could go
down up and boot 'em in the air
and then do a little combo and then do a grab,
drop 'em and then drop your ultimate
and you could go for over half their health in one hit
and it was so cool and then Cyclops
also had an infinite combo as well,
I believe Sabertooth had an infinite combo too
where you could literally, if you were good enough,
in turbo mode you pretty much just keep hitting them
until they lost all their health
but that was very difficult to do.
You'd had to get on a roll.
I actually can't replicate it here today
but I can do my original combos
with both Cyclops and Sabertooth
so what we'll do, we'll cut a bit of B roll here
playing the games and also this little box here,
but in the outro what we'll talk about with this
is what you can do on a budget
to emulate your arcade machine
and let's just get on with it, I guess.
(relaxing music)
(video game noises)
So there it is with this whole setup
and the arcade retro gaming PC
with some weird components thrown in
where we had the budget monitor that I got
for 10 Aussy dollars and it's a 4x3 monitor
and I think it does perfect with these older arcade games
which did have a similar resolution ratio
if I'm not mistaken
and honestly after the third game
I just started losing track of time
because some of these games are just absolute classics
and they're so much fun to revisit them on a joystick
which I'd always played on a controller with the D pad
in the past so playing Mega Man on a joystick,
that was just absolutely crazy cool
and then obviously playing X-Men vs. Street Fighter,
doing those old school combos,
bringing back a bit of life and memories
is just really a lot of fun
and the funny thing is about today's build
is this case right here, I checked the prices online
and it's coming in at 70 US dollars at the moment
and I just think it's too much at the moment
for a Mini-ITX case that doesn't have
a whole lot going for it in 2019
and I did watch some reviews
before I did this review on this case
and I sort of wanted to think
what's the one thing I could do with it?
And this was it and that was putting together a budget
sort of arcade retro machine,
where you're not using a dedicated graphics card
because the graphics card's kind of too long
for the case but you can getaway with putting in
a real budget power supply
that you don't have to worry about
if you're going with an A320 motherboard
and a cheap APU
and then you can get the best out of this case
so I would like to see it come down
at least at retail to it's promised price
of 59 dollars and I believe it was
somewhere in the 80 Aussy dollars,
where it does look nice
but it does have some questionable design traits
but I guess we'll just take it as it comes
so doing it with a retro build like this is really cool
but don't waste your money on a water cooler.
I'd definitely think about going with
like a Athlon 200GE which is currently 55 bucks
or a Ryzen 2200G which is 80 dollars
and then going with a cheap A320
which can be had for round about 50 dollars
and the eight gigabytes, two four gigabyte sticks,
that'll set you back about 39 dollars
and then you can get a real cheap power supply.
You don't have to worry too much,
I mean don't go real, like that cheap,
but definitely look out for something
like a Dell OEM on eBay or something like that,
they go for real cheap as long as it's got the 24 pin
and four pin CPU connector, plug it into your motherboard
and then you'll have happy days.
Now, as for a joystick you can get these
for round about 40 dollars new
and that'll be better than the one I have here
so that'll have more buttons
and I believe some people are saying
it's got an upgrade path too so you can,
if you're really getting into it
you can upgrade the joystick and buttons in the future
on this one for 40 bucks
so retro gaming has never been better
where it's pretty easy to do
and as I said before, I did come into a lot of problems
setting this up, but once you get past that learning curve
it's just a whole lot of fun
and now that I've done the learning curve,
I can just share with you guys
and save you guys the hassles
and that would be go with Retro Arch
and go with WinKawaks for the Capcom games
and of course go get your ROM's yourself
and then load them into those ROM folders
in both those front ends
and then you should have happy days.
It was a pretty straightforward process
once I got the right beginner-friendly front ends
and they worked perfectly, I had no problems
figuring them both out,
setting up the controllers in both these applications
was a breeze and then you got to use that joystick
and it worked flawlessly and I will state
that I did think it ran smoother
in full screen dedicated mode,
where I noticed a little bit of choppiness
when it was out of full screen mode
so if you wanna play these titles
and emulate them in Windows 10
then definitely play them in full screen mode
but other than that,
just a real blast to the past
and I sort of got side traced where I didn't upload
to my regular schedule because I was figuring all this out
and I just ended up enjoying myself as well
and I was only playing three titles.
That's all I played here today
and there's so many more titles to explore,
so if you guys see me not uploading as much
and I'm growing a beard and stuff like that
you'll know what's happened.
I'm just enjoying those retro games
just like my 80's music.
I love the old school stuff and there's just some element
to these old games where they're just, like,
they're cheesy sometimes,
like especially with Battle Toads and Double Dragons.
These games can be cheesy and repetitive.
You're just sitting there scratching your head,
like I can't do anything, waiting just to get owned
but they do require a lot of timing and finesse
and that's something I love.
Especially X-Men vs. Street Fighter.
That thing is all about critical timing
on getting those combos off,
so let me know what you guys think
in the comment section below.
Do you like this sort of different kind of video?
I really enjoyed doing this one.
I definitely want to set up in the next step,
make a bodge, maybe I guess new
would be better in this case
because everyone can go get the parts
and then build something for themselves
without being a total PC enthusiast
but maybe we can get, like, an arcade box set up
for as cheap as possible
and get the two joysticks
and have it two player and stuff like that
and go through the whole process start to finish.
If you'd like to see a video like that,
then definitely let us know in the comment section below
but also in closing out, let us know
what you think of today's arcade setup
and I did utilize this H100,
I think it's the H100 P as best as I could
because again, as I said in the intro
I didn't, just coming into the review of this case,
I didn't really like a whole lot of things about it.
I thought for a typical,
especially for an enthusiast build it's out of the question.
It's just got too big of a space that's been wasted
for the size of it.
And then they put in that full size ATX power supply
and like, well not many people are going to be utilizing
this space and it was at this stage I thought
you know, like especially coming from me
building in the 2013 Lian li TU100 suitcase case.
That was smaller and I could fit more in that.
That was a really well designed case
and then this year I come to this
and I'm like, well what can we utilize this for?
And I guess saving money but still keeping
a small form factor and then going with a retro build
is probably a good choice and that's probably the only thing
I could recommend this case for
or of course if you really like the look of it
and you just wanna build like, a home theater PC.
Something really lightweight.
I guess that's where this thing kind of made sense
if its price drops down to that promised 59 US dollars.
But with hat aside, I hope you enjoyed today's video
and if you did then be sure to hit that like button for us
and I'll catch you in another tech video very soon.
The used parts hunt is on the way.
That'll be starting tomorrow
and there's also some juicy used parts videos
coming very soon, so stay tuned
and I'll see you next time.
Peace out for now.
Bye.
(upbeat music)