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I am interested in using my AC100 to run some emulators so that I can play some games from some older game consoles. This isnt much of an issue for x86 machines, or ARM machines running Android. But for an AC100 running Linux, it isnt quite as easy. I am personally running Ubuntu 12.04, so the information I am providing is most useful if you are running a similar setup. Whenever possible, I try to get my gamepad (a Logitech Dual Action) to work logically with the game. If anyone wants to edit this page with their experiences, or information pertaining to other Linux distributions, please feel free.
There is another ARM powered Linux machine out there that is commonly used for running emulators. It is the OpenPandora. Here is a page concerning emulator compatibility for that specific platform, but which may be of some use for the AC100:
http://pandorawiki.org/Emulator_list
Sega Genesis
DGen
Heres DGen compiled for armhf by another AC100 user. I found it here:
http://ac100.wikispaces.com/file/detail/dgen_1.30-1_armhf.deb/318451022
http://ac100.wikispaces.com/DGen\SDL
Frame rates are pretty good, but can be inconsistent. At times there is a drop in frame rate which is pretty annoying, but with some configuration may be able to eliminate this. It recognized my gamepad no problem; options for configuring it are not obvious, but default setup works well in my case. Sound works great.
Sega Saturn
Yabause
I still dont have this program actually running a game yet.
In the Ubuntu 12.04 repository, there is no Yabause-gtk or Yabause-qt package, which is one of Yabauses' dependencies. This is fixed in 12.10. What I did before I found the Ubuntu package was pull packages from Debian Sid. The following is how I started to try to get Yabause running, but I never made it as far as actually running a ROM image. First make sure you have installed freeglut3 and libmini18n1 which are available in the regular Ubuntu repositories. I found an armhf .deb package here:
http://packages.debian.org/sid/armhf/yabause-gtk/download
However, the version of Yabause-common available in the Ubuntu repository does not match the one required by this version of Yabause-gtk. A compatible version can be found here:
http://packages.debian.org/sid/all/yabause-common/download
This allows me to launch Yabause and configure it, including gamepad and video. However, the program crashes when trying to load a ROM file. Hopefully the package found in the Ubuntu 12.10 repository works better.
NES
GFCEU
GFCEU is a graphical front end to FCEU, both available through the Ubuntu repository. I do not consider the frame rates good enough to be playable. Sound is sketchy. Recognizes my gamepad no problem though, and is easy to configure.
FCEUX
http://www.fceux.com/web/home.html
FCEUX is based on FCEU, and is an attempt to merge the best qualities of the many off-shoots of FCEU. I have gotten decent results using this program. Here is the direct download:
With the exception of not doing it through an SVN repository, I used the instructions found here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=971455
Extract the archive. For this example, I will just use ~/
Then open a terminal and run the following commands;
sudo apt-get install scons libsdl1.2-dev subversion libgtk2.0-dev
cd ~/fceultra/
sudo scons install
To help improve performance, I lowered sound quality to 22050Hz and “Low” quality. Sound still sounds good after doing this. I have not changed any of the other sound settings but they may be able to improve performance further. Configuring the gamepad is easy, and the settings are automatically saved. However, the configuration seems somewhat buggy, but not too bad. Setting the video mode to PAL seemed to make even the music run slower, which does not seem proper to me. I did not try too many other settings. All in all, Id say playable, but there is definitely room for improvement.
SNES
bsnes
Good options for configuring a gamepad. However, whenever I try to load a ROM, the program crashes, taking my gamepad configuration with it. Also seems picky about file extensions.
GameBoy Color
Gngb
http://m.peponas.free.fr/gngb/
I havent actually played a game, but I have loaded one. Emulation seems very fast. However, when sound is enabled, the program freezes and pins my CPU to 100%. I have to ctrl-alt-f6 and kill gngb from there, and then I can switch back to ctrl-alt-f7. The program recognizes my gamepad, but there is no obvious way to configure it, and the default configuration is unusable.