What's the cheapest way to get into GameCube and Wii emulation?

[Glen707]

I want to emulate these GameCube and Wii games at either 720p or 1080p (and be able to output to a TV via HDMI);

New Super Mario Bros
Super Mario Galaxy 1& 2
Super Mario Sunshine (with Skip EFB Access disabled so goo works properly)
Pikmin 2 (GC)
Twilight Princess (GC) & Wind Waker (GC).

I don't care if it's based on windows, Linux, or a custom OS for emulation specifically. I just want a dedicated machine for the cheapest price. Any suggestions?

Thanks!

[Helios]

Around $300. Pick a case

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/n7K8NQ

This is the absolute cheapest you'll probably get, and it probably runs those games fine. Maybe google around to see if anybody has used the 2200G with Dolphin, if it sucks, bump it up to a Ryzen 3/5 with a clock speed of around 4 ghz and grab some cheap dedicated GPU.

[bomblord]

Depends on how much you're willing to sacrifice to get there. If you start getting into the used market things get more complicated though as you can occasionally find great deals on used PC's a decently specced (4th gen i5 or greater) business desktop for around $100 can definitely get you playable framerates in Dolphin.

A $500-$700 PC will do all those flawlessly at high resolutions. How you build that is up to you but aim for an i5(or AMD equivalent) and current generation dedicated GPU. If you go this route there's no compromises on playability.

For around $450 The Intel NUC with the Radeon 540 is a good tiny plug-n-play setup for emulation mini PC that might run Dolphin.

A $300 PC build based on the Ryzen 3 2200G will do those games and pair it with a Asrock Deskmini barebones kit for a tiny living room emulation PC.

If you can accept some drops and some incompatible games $180 Shield TV should do you solid but don't expect to be running games above 1080p and you will definitely run into some issues.

If you have a high end 64 bit android phone with the right hardware you might be able to side-load Dolphin on it and get playable framerates and that would be $0 out of your pocket.