Which of my options is the best way to play emulators on a TV?
I am looking to play consoles games up to and including the Saturn/N64 on my TV, and I have several options to do so, but I’d like to know what people feel is the *best* way to do this, especially in regards to input lag. I recently set up my Amazon FireCube for emulation, but after trying both Retroarch and RetroX, the Mega Drive games I tried all felt oddly laggy, especially with my 8bit Do Saturn controller where games like Sonic basically required precognition to play. Whether this is because of the Cube itself or something else I do not know.
I used to have a soft modded original Xbox and it was absolutely excellent for the job, with generally minor input lag and a fantastic range of emulators, but it didn’t have an HDMI output or Bluetooth, I had to FTP into it, and the console itself died on me a few years back, so unless I invest into repairing/hard modding it, it is kind of out.
I have a soft modded ps2 and I have run emulators on it, but unless the scene has developed significantly it was always pretty bare bones and I don’t recall even SNES emulation being that great on it. Hardware wise it was also lacks both Bluetooth and HDMI out.
The Wii wasn’t bad at all, though I still always noticed platforms felt a little unresponsive with it. Controller is great, though! I don’t think it handled beyond the SNES, though. 🤔
I have been looking at my PS3 slim and running HEN to check out emulation options on it, but I don’t know if the effort is going to be worthwhile — for PS3 games it will be, of course, but for PS1 and older I am not sure.
Ditto for my old 360 that is gathering dust — I have absolutely 0 idea what the scene looks like on that thing.
I have my MacBook as well, but I’m not sure how I feel about connecting and disconnecting it all the time, I’d probably prefer to just leave a console or streaming box hooked up if they are better options.
I guess what I’m asking is, if I am going to focus on one of these options for an emulation machine I just leave hooked to my TV, what is the best option? I play a ton of platformers and racing games, so input lag kills me.