Super slow old Samsung laptop, needs Light weight distro, for SNES games mebbe?
2026-04-04 16:25 UTC
Replies (8)
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@BananaTrifleViolin@piefed.world 2026-04-04 20:27
This laptop is more than capable of running SNES emulation; its 1GHz quadcore, and 4gb ram. SNES is an old system which had 3.58Mhz CPU and 128kb ram; you'll be able to emulate it without much issue on that laptop. BSNES has low requirements (like an Athlon or Pentium 4, and 512mb ram, and Open GL2), although if you have problems then Snes9x and ZSnes are less accurate but lighter weight. RetroArch is pretty convenient way to deploy emulators and has BSNES, Snes9x and Snex9x_Next cores to use. A lightweight Desktop Environement may help make the laptop feel snappier; Xfce or Lxqt. If it feels slow then you want a minimal desktop which doesn't have overhead like compositing. Also don't use flatpaks especially if you multitask; use native apps as flatpaks have some overhead. Mint as a distro is fine for installing lightweight desktop environments, and if you wanted you could install Linux Mint Xfce edition from scratch.
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@moody@lemmings.world 2026-04-04 19:50
SNES emulators ran just fine on <100 mHz CPUs three decades ago. You'd have to try pretty hard to find a PC that couldn't do that nowadays.
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@mr_anny@sopuli.xyz 2026-04-04 20:29
Batocera. It has all the emulators built in and supports literally every game controller out of the box. It fits on 16Gb drive. It can be a bit to configure until you find the optional combination. I run it on my 2011 HP laptop with i5-2430M and Intel HD 3000 graphics. edit: typo
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@bright_side_@piefed.world 2026-04-04 17:10
Its a slow CPU, but will do fine for SNES emulation. But if you already have 24.04 on it (or is this a live boot), just go ahead and try. Might be fine. Xfce if it is just too slow to use but I would even give a "normal" KDE or gnome distro a shot.
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@warmaster@lemmy.world 2026-04-04 22:24
Lakka, Batocera ?
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@lonesomeCat@lemmy.ml 2026-04-05 06:01
I had hard time finding the CPU model and I couldn't Anyway MXLinux is a great option
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@Redkey@programming.dev 2026-04-05 00:46
Years ago I used to have Lakka on a bootable USB drive to turn an old, low-powered laptop into a dedicated emulation machine. The specs are hard to read, but I believe the main processor is an AMD A6-1450 APU, designed for tablets and released some time in or after 2013. Not a powerful chip by modern standards, but IMO still useable depending on your expectations. It's definitely capable of emulating SNES without breaking a sweat. Even PS1 shouldn't be a problem at native resolution. N64, Saturn, and Dreamcast are probably where you'll start seeing slowdown in some games, and anything more, like PS2 or GCN, is unlikely to be playable.
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@DimFisher@lemmy.world 2026-04-05 02:39
I don't know about your processor but I think your memory can handle SNES games just fine, you need only one emulator and that is Retroarch, after install you open it with sudo and you can install cores for anything, from Sega Genesis to Mame, SNES, Ps1, psp, dreamcast etc, it's one of the best