He Was Gonna Throw Away This Old PC, Now it’s an Emulation Machine

**Testing the Power of Botocera on a Core 2 Duo PC**

As I began testing Botocera on my Core 2 Duo PC, I was excited to see how well it would perform. The rig, equipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 graphics card, seemed like it should be able to handle some of the more demanding retro games out there.

**Resolution and Performance**

I started by testing Botocera's ability to run at native resolution on my PC. I didn't upscale or use any other methods to improve performance, so I was curious to see how well things would hold up. The results were mixed - while some games like this one ran smoothly at a decent frame rate, others struggled to maintain above 30 FPS. For example, the game Road Rage Billy Hatcher, which is considered an easier title to emulate, managed to run at around 60 FPS on OpenGL native resolution.

On the other hand, some harder-to-emulate games like Gran Turismo 4 struggled to run smoothly. When I jumped up to a more demanding game like Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex using the European version of the game, we were only able to achieve around 34-37 FPS with all the hacks turned on. As soon as the race started, the game would lock up, and even without any hacks, we barely managed to scrape together around 18 FPS.

**The Role of Hacks in Performance**

It became clear that using too many hacks was the culprit behind these performance issues. When I reduced the number of hacks used, the game's performance improved significantly - from 34-37 FPS down to a more respectable 50 FPS without any hacks, and even lower with some hacks turned off.

**Power Consumption and Heat Output**

While Botocera performed well in terms of emulation capabilities, it was clear that this PC was not exactly power-efficient. The system's total power consumption ranged from around 72 watts while idling to a whopping 170 watts when running demanding games like Dreamcast or PS2 titles. This is likely due to the older hardware used in this rig, which may struggle to keep up with modern emulation software.

**The Future of Retro Gaming on PC**

Despite these limitations, it's clear that Botocera can still be a great option for those looking to play retro games on their PC. With a little creativity and experimentation, it's possible to find hacks and tweaks that will improve performance and make these older systems run smoothly. While this particular rig may not be the most efficient or powerful, with a bit of tweaking, it's still capable of delivering smooth performance for many classic titles.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, testing Botocera on my Core 2 Duo PC revealed some mixed results - while some games ran smoothly at high frame rates, others struggled to maintain above 30 FPS. However, by reducing the number of hacks used and experimenting with different settings, it's possible to improve performance and make these older systems run smoothly. If you're looking to build a retro gaming rig on a budget, this may be worth considering - just be aware that power consumption and heat output may be an issue.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be turning this dumpster pc into an emulation machine well at least we're going to be trying to do that now by dumpster pc i mean this was actually given to me for free my neighbor was about to throw it out it's actually been sitting in his garage for a little while the hard drive died on a couple years ago and uh he asked me if i wanted to do something with it and i said sure before he even knew what kind of specs it had and you know i didn't get really lucky with it because basically what we have here is a core 2 duo it's an e 8400 2 course running at 3 gigahertz we have 2 gigabytes of ddr2 ram but one thing that i was actually surprised about given it's definitely an older card and not much use in gaming right now it's got a gtx 560 2 gigabyte variant so yeah this is definitely an older pc and my neighbor had it since it was brand new it came out of the box running windows vista it had one gig of ram and over the years he's upgraded it to a whopping two gigs of ram he's also added a 400 watt power supply and this gtx 560 from pallet so yeah newer nvidia drivers are basically non-existent for windows on this card here and unfortunately just never got vulcan support and that's kind of a big letdown but uh we're gonna see what we can do with opengl and in order to do all this we're gonna be running an operating system called photosera first thing i tried was everything from a usb drive this does work on other pcs i've tested but for this one here load times were ridiculously slow we do have usb 2.0 up front and usb 1.0 around the back here now eventually it would load up i could get into the operating system but even just trying to launch an easier to run game like a game boy advance game it took ages so what i did was grab a two terabyte western digital sata drive that i had laying around i just installed photosera on this i threw some games on it plugged it into the pc itself and everything loaded up way quicker i mean a hundred times faster given that this thing is so old initially i was a little worried that the hardware just wasn't up to par but as soon as i installed this drive here i was able to get in and everything's working pretty decently now the only thing i wasn't able to get working with this rig here was sound over hdmi i tried absolutely everything so i actually just resorted to using the 3.5 millimeter audio jack on the pc and as soon as i plugged it in we got sound but hdmi sound isn't working through this gt560 i didn't try any wireless controllers with this rig but if you did end up doing something like this i would highly suggest buying a controller that comes with a 2.4 gigahertz dongle or you can just go with a usb controller like i'm using here these are relatively cheap and they do work great in photosera first up we're gonna go with dreamcast i'll do doa2 by the way we're using the flycat score inside of retroarch all right so here we are with dreamcast fps is up in the top right hand corner and going into dreamcast i really didn't think we'd have any issues with it after all we do have a three gigahertz x86 cpu here it doesn't take much to run dreamcast whether you're using flycast or redream there might be a few harder to emulate games that do struggle a bit but even when it comes to doa2 we're running at 60 years so let's go ahead and move over to let's say ps1 ps1 is also looking really good but when it comes down to it i mean this will run on the raspberry pi too so it doesn't take much at all to run these playstation 1 games even a harder one like bloody royal too moving over to a thomas wave we're using the flycast core same court we were using with dreamcast and performance is great but we do have some graphical issues if you take a closer look at the characters there's some black boxes around them and this could really come down to the older gpu here's n64 using retroarch and the move pin 64 plus next core really great performance with double 07 gold and i i didn't do any upscaling but uh checking out the fps in the top right hand corner there's a chance we could go up a bit with it either way you look at it n64 emulation was originally built for x86 and these core 2 duos do handle it really well i also wanted to test a little bit of arcade emulation here we have ninja turtles i'm using mame 2003 inside of retro arch and if you wanted to use the standalone version of mame it should work really well also on this x86 cpu but we're getting great performance and something like this would actually be really cheap to put inside of an arcade cabinet so this psp emulation was actually pretty impressive i was able to go up to 3x resolution with this at 4x i did notice it drop a little bit but at 3x even tekken 6 is running at full speed this is the standalone version of ppsspp fps is in the top right hand corner it's running at 60. i mean this is looking really good i got one more here for psp still at 3x resolution remember we don't have access to vulcan on this so this is all opengl so it'll do mame it'll do nes snes game boy advance n64 it even does dreamcast and psp pretty good but what about gamecube emulation now in the past i have tested a very similar cpu core 2 duo it was actually running a little over 3 gigahertz and believe it or not with the right gpu we did get some pretty decent gamecube emulation using the dolphin emulator and since bottocera has dolphin built in i figured we'd go ahead and test it i wanted to start off light so first up we have the simpsons road rage we're using opengl on compiling shaders before the game starts and we're at the native gamecube resolution i didn't upscale or anything like that i think that's really going to be where it kind of struggles even with the easier to run games like this one here but with something like road rage billy hatcher even time splitters you should be able to get away with 60fps opengl native resolution now i don't think it's going to do the harder to emulate games but let's move over to something that i always like to test which is auto modalista all right so everything's looking pretty decent now it's actually working better than i thought but as soon as i come around this corner we got some more effects on screen and a larger draw distance kind of falls on its face and i was expecting this so when it comes to the harder to run games on a rig like this it's just not going to cut it especially something like f-zero i mean you're probably only going to be running that game at about 38 fps but uh it's actually trying its hardest and even with some weed 2.5 d games it's gonna run at 60. this isn't bad at all and i was expecting a lot worse out of this rig and the final thing i wanted to test was ps2 emulation botocera uses the standalone version of pcsx2 the only way i could get this crash bandicoot game to run at full speed was to use the european version so right off the top we basically knocked off 10 fps because this will only run at 50 and i have a ton of hacks on in the background i got some frame skip going i mean i had to turn on basically every hack we could in the pc sx2 emulator to get this to run crash bandicoot the wrath of cortex is an easier ps2 game to emulate when we jump up to something a little harder to emulate like gran turismo 4 we're not even into gameplay yet using the european version of the game here so we should be running at 50. i've got all the hacks on that i can run before the screen goes black we're at around 34 fps with this one 34-37 and we haven't even started the race since i have so many hacks on as soon as the race really starts it locks up and the same goes for other harder to emulate ps2 games like god of war 2 it just locks up on me and i think basically what's happening here is i just have way too many hacks on if i was to try to run this game without any hacks we're at about 18 fps now the other thing that might be happening with these harder to emulate ps2 games is the whole system's running out of ram because after all we only have two gigabytes of ram in this thing so yeah it definitely works great for emulation and these core 2 duos actually do pretty good you got to get something at least three gigahertz to get the performance that you were seeing in this video but uh another thing to keep in mind is if you do want to put something like this together it's going to be burning a lot of electricity it's going to pull a lot of wattage from the wall i've done some tests here i use a kilowatt meter plugged into the wall and this is total system power consumption the cpu and gpu and this thing are very inefficient when you compare it to newer cpus and gpus actually i've seen online that this gtx 560 can pull up to 150 watts but in my test this thing idles around 72 watts when it comes to 2d gaming like game boy advance 118 watts and on average for dreamcast psp and gamecube this thing's pulling 170 watts from the wall and that gtx 560 does put off a lot of heat so that's going to wrap it up for this video i really appreciate you watching i mean it's totally possible to run botocera or your favorite emulation operating system on a pc like this even with that older core 2 duo by the way this is the 64-bit version of botocero working on this little cpu here if it was up to me and i had to build a cheap pc for bottocera i would go with something like a third channel or 4th gen i5 along with a gt 1030 but if you pick something like this up for free or close to free you can still get by with playing some of your favorite retro games at full speed and the performance that we saw really isn't that bad for the age of all these parts here if you're interested in getting botocera up and running on a pc that you already have i do have a full tutorial link for that is in the description if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watchingwhat's going on guys this eta prime back here again today we're going to be turning this dumpster pc into an emulation machine well at least we're going to be trying to do that now by dumpster pc i mean this was actually given to me for free my neighbor was about to throw it out it's actually been sitting in his garage for a little while the hard drive died on a couple years ago and uh he asked me if i wanted to do something with it and i said sure before he even knew what kind of specs it had and you know i didn't get really lucky with it because basically what we have here is a core 2 duo it's an e 8400 2 course running at 3 gigahertz we have 2 gigabytes of ddr2 ram but one thing that i was actually surprised about given it's definitely an older card and not much use in gaming right now it's got a gtx 560 2 gigabyte variant so yeah this is definitely an older pc and my neighbor had it since it was brand new it came out of the box running windows vista it had one gig of ram and over the years he's upgraded it to a whopping two gigs of ram he's also added a 400 watt power supply and this gtx 560 from pallet so yeah newer nvidia drivers are basically non-existent for windows on this card here and unfortunately just never got vulcan support and that's kind of a big letdown but uh we're gonna see what we can do with opengl and in order to do all this we're gonna be running an operating system called photosera first thing i tried was everything from a usb drive this does work on other pcs i've tested but for this one here load times were ridiculously slow we do have usb 2.0 up front and usb 1.0 around the back here now eventually it would load up i could get into the operating system but even just trying to launch an easier to run game like a game boy advance game it took ages so what i did was grab a two terabyte western digital sata drive that i had laying around i just installed photosera on this i threw some games on it plugged it into the pc itself and everything loaded up way quicker i mean a hundred times faster given that this thing is so old initially i was a little worried that the hardware just wasn't up to par but as soon as i installed this drive here i was able to get in and everything's working pretty decently now the only thing i wasn't able to get working with this rig here was sound over hdmi i tried absolutely everything so i actually just resorted to using the 3.5 millimeter audio jack on the pc and as soon as i plugged it in we got sound but hdmi sound isn't working through this gt560 i didn't try any wireless controllers with this rig but if you did end up doing something like this i would highly suggest buying a controller that comes with a 2.4 gigahertz dongle or you can just go with a usb controller like i'm using here these are relatively cheap and they do work great in photosera first up we're gonna go with dreamcast i'll do doa2 by the way we're using the flycat score inside of retroarch all right so here we are with dreamcast fps is up in the top right hand corner and going into dreamcast i really didn't think we'd have any issues with it after all we do have a three gigahertz x86 cpu here it doesn't take much to run dreamcast whether you're using flycast or redream there might be a few harder to emulate games that do struggle a bit but even when it comes to doa2 we're running at 60 years so let's go ahead and move over to let's say ps1 ps1 is also looking really good but when it comes down to it i mean this will run on the raspberry pi too so it doesn't take much at all to run these playstation 1 games even a harder one like bloody royal too moving over to a thomas wave we're using the flycast core same court we were using with dreamcast and performance is great but we do have some graphical issues if you take a closer look at the characters there's some black boxes around them and this could really come down to the older gpu here's n64 using retroarch and the move pin 64 plus next core really great performance with double 07 gold and i i didn't do any upscaling but uh checking out the fps in the top right hand corner there's a chance we could go up a bit with it either way you look at it n64 emulation was originally built for x86 and these core 2 duos do handle it really well i also wanted to test a little bit of arcade emulation here we have ninja turtles i'm using mame 2003 inside of retro arch and if you wanted to use the standalone version of mame it should work really well also on this x86 cpu but we're getting great performance and something like this would actually be really cheap to put inside of an arcade cabinet so this psp emulation was actually pretty impressive i was able to go up to 3x resolution with this at 4x i did notice it drop a little bit but at 3x even tekken 6 is running at full speed this is the standalone version of ppsspp fps is in the top right hand corner it's running at 60. i mean this is looking really good i got one more here for psp still at 3x resolution remember we don't have access to vulcan on this so this is all opengl so it'll do mame it'll do nes snes game boy advance n64 it even does dreamcast and psp pretty good but what about gamecube emulation now in the past i have tested a very similar cpu core 2 duo it was actually running a little over 3 gigahertz and believe it or not with the right gpu we did get some pretty decent gamecube emulation using the dolphin emulator and since bottocera has dolphin built in i figured we'd go ahead and test it i wanted to start off light so first up we have the simpsons road rage we're using opengl on compiling shaders before the game starts and we're at the native gamecube resolution i didn't upscale or anything like that i think that's really going to be where it kind of struggles even with the easier to run games like this one here but with something like road rage billy hatcher even time splitters you should be able to get away with 60fps opengl native resolution now i don't think it's going to do the harder to emulate games but let's move over to something that i always like to test which is auto modalista all right so everything's looking pretty decent now it's actually working better than i thought but as soon as i come around this corner we got some more effects on screen and a larger draw distance kind of falls on its face and i was expecting this so when it comes to the harder to run games on a rig like this it's just not going to cut it especially something like f-zero i mean you're probably only going to be running that game at about 38 fps but uh it's actually trying its hardest and even with some weed 2.5 d games it's gonna run at 60. this isn't bad at all and i was expecting a lot worse out of this rig and the final thing i wanted to test was ps2 emulation botocera uses the standalone version of pcsx2 the only way i could get this crash bandicoot game to run at full speed was to use the european version so right off the top we basically knocked off 10 fps because this will only run at 50 and i have a ton of hacks on in the background i got some frame skip going i mean i had to turn on basically every hack we could in the pc sx2 emulator to get this to run crash bandicoot the wrath of cortex is an easier ps2 game to emulate when we jump up to something a little harder to emulate like gran turismo 4 we're not even into gameplay yet using the european version of the game here so we should be running at 50. i've got all the hacks on that i can run before the screen goes black we're at around 34 fps with this one 34-37 and we haven't even started the race since i have so many hacks on as soon as the race really starts it locks up and the same goes for other harder to emulate ps2 games like god of war 2 it just locks up on me and i think basically what's happening here is i just have way too many hacks on if i was to try to run this game without any hacks we're at about 18 fps now the other thing that might be happening with these harder to emulate ps2 games is the whole system's running out of ram because after all we only have two gigabytes of ram in this thing so yeah it definitely works great for emulation and these core 2 duos actually do pretty good you got to get something at least three gigahertz to get the performance that you were seeing in this video but uh another thing to keep in mind is if you do want to put something like this together it's going to be burning a lot of electricity it's going to pull a lot of wattage from the wall i've done some tests here i use a kilowatt meter plugged into the wall and this is total system power consumption the cpu and gpu and this thing are very inefficient when you compare it to newer cpus and gpus actually i've seen online that this gtx 560 can pull up to 150 watts but in my test this thing idles around 72 watts when it comes to 2d gaming like game boy advance 118 watts and on average for dreamcast psp and gamecube this thing's pulling 170 watts from the wall and that gtx 560 does put off a lot of heat so that's going to wrap it up for this video i really appreciate you watching i mean it's totally possible to run botocera or your favorite emulation operating system on a pc like this even with that older core 2 duo by the way this is the 64-bit version of botocero working on this little cpu here if it was up to me and i had to build a cheap pc for bottocera i would go with something like a third channel or 4th gen i5 along with a gt 1030 but if you pick something like this up for free or close to free you can still get by with playing some of your favorite retro games at full speed and the performance that we saw really isn't that bad for the age of all these parts here if you're interested in getting botocera up and running on a pc that you already have i do have a full tutorial link for that is in the description if you have any questions let me know in the comments below and like always thanks for watching\n"