Hardware Requirements questions; building a Dolphin Box for Smash

[Praxis]

Hello,

I've yet to have the opportunity to try Dolphin out, but I was looking for some insight on the specs. I'm a competitive Super Smash Bros tournament player, and we run in to a lot of problems playing the Smash games competitively on HDTVs. There are just a few frames of lag that most people don't notice that occur when playing a Wii/GameCube game on an HDTV, because the Wii maxes out at an analog 480p signal, and this has to be converted to the native resolution of the TV (usually a digital 1080p signal with modern TVs).

For most games, people can't see a 3-4 frame lag, but to a competitive player, it is unacceptable. The amount of lag that is produced by the conversion varies from TV to TV as well, and there's no way to know prior to purchase without bringing your Wii to the store and hooking it up. Most competitive players just keep old SDTVs around for Smash tournaments. If only there was a way to get the Wii to output in 1080p natively, eh?

tl;dr version: I think Dolphin can solve the problem.
I was thinking of building a dedicated Dolphin box (complete with GameCube controller to USB adapters) just to hook up to HDTV's via HDMI/DVI. It would, however, have to be able to run Super Smash Bros Melee and Brawl in 1080p, at a smooth 60 FPS. I'd strip down the Windows install as much as possible, disable most services, and remove all other applications from the PC to keep performance stable.

What kind of hardware would I be looking at? My existing (aging) PC is a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Quad (Kentsfield) w/Geforce 8800 GT. Would I be looking at similar specs? Higher? I'm not sure how taxing Dolphin is, or how stable it runs.

Thanks for any insight!

[NaturalViolence]

I'm not sure how taxing Dolphin is

That depends heavily on the game, settings, and which revision you use. Some games are playable with a pentium 4 with the right revision and settings while others will not run fullspeed all the time with any settings on any revision even with an i7 980x + GTX 580. Also the more players you have in multiplayer games the slower the emulation will be. The real question is "how taxing is brawl?" which I wouldn't know since I don't have the game. I would advise you find the the super smash bros. brawl thread in the game discussion forum and ask them in there.

I can tell you that as long as you set efb scale to fractional, turn off pixel lighting, and turn off AA that video card will have no problem with any game at 1920 x 1080.

Make sure to stay the hell away from recent revisions until the fifo work is done since you will experience a lot of stuttering.

In general I would advise against this whole idea since the amount of input lag generated by the display will be nothing compared to the amount generated by emulation.

Most games should run fine with a Q6600 (your cpu) if you OC to 3.2GHz but some will not. If you have the money get an i3 540 and overclock it to 4.4 GHz and that should be enough to run 99% of games at fullspeed all the time so I would assume it would be enough for 4 players in brawl.

[skid]

As you are a tournament player, I'd suggest that you do not use Dolphin to practice on. The timing differences between Dolphin and the real Wii would be much greater than the lag you'd get on the TV. Dolphin's system timing is not precise enough for the level that you need. Just my 2c.

[inteGReddy]

dang. im down for some brawl netplay. best game evuh!!