Hello, I am new to these forums and have a question about specs for OSX, spesifcally the Mac Mini. I wish to pruchase a mac mini and am wondering what the minimal specs are to run Wii and GameCube games on Dolphin.
I found a -- Apple Mac Mini Server Mid 2010 Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz 4GB RAM 500GB OSX 10.8.5 -- on ebay
I am wondering if this is fine for Dolphin, and if not, what should be improved.
(Im aware a PC is better, but im spesically looking for a Mini with good specs)
It's not something I would attempt to run Dolphin on. The CPU is very, very outdated. It may have been good around Dolphin 3.0 or probably 2.0, but these days Dolphin needs a relatively modern and fast CPU. There's no indication of a dedicated GPU either, so I doubt you'd even be able to play recent versions of Dolphin at all. You'd be forced to use whatever integrated graphics are on the Core 2 Duo 2, and even back in 2010 I remember it being lackluster. I believe those only support OpenGL 2.1 at the max, and Dolphin needs OpenGL 3.3 minimum.
In short, I wouldn't bother with that. If you have a budget and a specific form-factor (small computer like a Mac Mini, NUC, Mini PC, etc) then we can help you build and machine, or find a good pre-made one. That Mac Mini is better suited to older emulation (anything up and including N64, PS1, maybe Dreamcast depending on what game and emulator you use). It's a lost cause as far as Dolphin is concerned though.
Any of the Mac Mini's 2010 or earlier woukd not be a good idea at all for the reasons Shonumi brought up.
Really only the 2018 models have a decent chance of being good for Dolphin emulation and maybe the 2 2014 models that have the iris 5100 graphics. All the others have better CPUs then the Core2duo, but not by that much. This is also assuming that temperatures and power delivery are good on these Mac Mini(s), but given Apple's track record I do not exactly hold out a lot of hope.
Why specifically a Mac Mini? Is it the combo of small PC and macOS? Because if you have some time and know how to follow a guide, it's not terribly hard to make macOS run on cheaper PC hardware. See sites like
https://www.tonymacx86.com/
(02-05-2019, 04:36 PM)TKSilver Wrote: [ -> ]Any of the Mac Mini's 2010 or earlier woukd not be a good idea at all for the reasons Shonumi brought up.
Really only the 2018 models have a decent chance of being good for Dolphin emulation and maybe the 2 2014 models that have the iris 5100 graphics. All the others have better CPUs then the Core2duo, but not by that much. This is also assuming that temperatures and power delivery are good on these Mac Mini(s), but given Apple's track record I do not exactly hold out a lot of hope.
The current Mac mini I have has a CPU of 2.22ghz and I read that if it’s Duo and has at least 2.66ghz then it would run fine. My current Mac mini runs games, even 64 games, at pretty bad frame rates, so I’m hoping if I upgrade to something with a better CPU, it’ll be good
Honestly that's not really enough anymore. You really need an Intel Haswell or AMD Ryzen or better CPU nowadays for Dolphin.
What emulator system are you using to play those games? Retroarch is probably your best bet if you aren't already using it, and you're honestly already in the right ball park for all of those systems up to the n64/ps1 era. An extra .44 GHz from the new system won't help unless you're already right on the edge of playable frame-rates.
Do you have a budget for upgrading your rig? We can try and help you find something way better if we know what your price range is.
Also, what model is your current Mac Mini? Click the apple logo in the top left of the screen, go to about my mac, and list here what it says there for model, mac OSX version, CPU, RAM, and GPU please. Maybe we get some more life out of what you're currently running.
Batocera linux might even help a little more since it is a stripped down distribution designed for playing retro games (basically like a retropi type OS). I have had success with some other C2Duo\Quad based systems and running emulation through it that would usually not run quite as well. It does have support for Dolphin, but keep in mind it is not something supported on this forum so if it works, great, if not you will have to get help from the Batocera comunity.
Generally, macOS needs faster hardware than either Linux or Windows for the same experience, due to deficiencies in the driver support requiring slower paths to be used, putting more load on the CPU (and sometimes the GPU) to do the "same" thing.
If your Mac mini is new enough (unlikely considering it's a core-2 era, but support is more based on GPU, so it may be possible if it has a dGPU), it may support Metal instead of OpenGL - which has (some) support in dolphin using a vulkan->metal wrapper. That may give a better experience than OpenGL if you're CPU bound.
And for the most part "stripped down" distros mainly help with disk space and ram issues - which tend not to be an issue for dolphin. Once you're playing the game itself, everything else on the system should be idle, and thus require near zero resources (outside of disk space/ram mentioned).