Be Excellent To Each Other

Note: I did think about putting this on Up For No Visitors but thought it probably wasn't worth it. And I couldn't be bothered to proof it.



PC's are rather like elephants. Big clumsy beasts that you really wouldn't want in your living room. OK so the Xbox 360 is hardly discreet but at least it's smaller than the kind of PC you'd want to play games on.

So most people use a games console as their gaming device of choice in their living room. But what happens if you want to play more than just the official sanctioned games? I'm not talking about (legitimate backups - Ed) but rather having a quick blast of Zub on a Speccy emulator. With the previous generation of consoles the answer was simple, buy an X-Box and mod it. However this was rather an inflexible solution that left you reliant on a small number of emulators being supported.

You could of course build a low spec mini PC. But this could be expensive and a pain. Or you could buy a Mac Mini if you were prepared to sell a kidney. But now there is an answer and it's called the Revo from Acer.


Good things come in small packages.




The first thing that strikes you about the Revo is the size. Its the thickness and height of two standard retail DVD cases, with slightly more depth. The unit comes bundled with a stand and a wireless keyboard and mouse, both of which look and feel like cheap rip-offs of the Apple equivalent. Oddly the wireless receiver isn't built into the main unit and you have to plug a tiny receiver into a spare USB socket.


Tesco Value Apple Wireless Keyboard.



The unit has 5 USB ports (4 after you've plugged the wireless dongle in), E-SATA, network, a memory card slot as well as analogue VGA and HDMI. One important note is that most TV's will have "overscan" active for the HDMI input which is where the edges of the picture get chopped off (this is a legacy feature from analogue days where the picture edges may contain stuff not intended to be seen). If you cannot disable this on your TV you will be better off with VGA. There is no DVI socket.

Some online reports suggest the Revo is fanless. Not so, it has a small fan that vents out of the top of the unit. But we're talking laptop levels of exhaust, not X-Box levels. Power comes from a laptop style PSU keeping the size of the main unit to a minimum.

The Revo also comes with a VESA mount that allows you to mount the unit behind your TV (providing it isn't wall mounted). This is a pretty neat party trick and makes the unit invisible

Windows 7 boots quickly, although you will find yourself having to remove a great deal of useless bundled software from the machine. You will be promoted to create some system disks in case of problems. This is all very well but the Acer wants to burn these to DVD, a slight problem on a machine that doesn't have an optical drive. Luckily I do have an external USB Blu-Ray drive so was able to burn my backups but how many people own external USB optical drives. This is a serious oversight by Acer and could be resolved by allowing you to save ISO's to a USB stick.

Still these are minor niggles. The machine itself seems to run quite snappily despite the inclusion of Microsoft's latest operating system. Standard emulators such as for the CPC, Spectrum and Amiga don't seem to tax the CPU to a great degree and the freeware games we tested such as Gridwars ran without issue at full HD resolution of 1920x1080.


The Revo can run Amiga games such as Frontier without issues, even if you want to emulate an A4000.



So can it run MAME? Well the answer is both "yes" and "no". We tried the latest version of the arcade emulator we suffered from slight slowdown and stuttering audio. Although the Revo had CPU time free, the problem appears to be that MAME only uses a single CPU core. However after taking some advice from the experts on our forum I downloaded a copy of MAME that was a couple of years old and it ran fine. It appears that MAME has become more bloated with time and in actual fact many of the mobile versions of MAME also run on older code. The bad news is that games such as Space Harrier will push the single core MAME uses to the max, the good news is that that the machine is dual core and there appears to be just enough grunt into the Atom for games such as Space Harrier to run at full screen without glitches.


A CPU graph just after having run Space Harrier.



In terms of modern PC games, you had better forget about it. Reports online suggest 3D games running at as little as 4 fps. This is a cut down system, it can do most things but the NVIDIA chipset is relying on the comparatively weedy Atom processor to do the work. While it can render most 2D material without a problem, it will have serious issues in 3D. Remember, many people buying gaming PC's will spend more money on their GPU than this system costs in total!

So in terms of having a machine under your TV that can emulate all the machines from your past and has a huge hard drive to hold them, the Revo is top notch. Add a USB joystick and you are away.

A basic older spec Revo running Linux can be picked up for as little as £130 although be aware that the older Atom processors are not dual core. Our review unit has a beefier Intel Atom 330 processor, 2gb of RAM, 250gb hard drive and Windows 7 coming in at £240 (March 2010). You'll need that extra grunt to be able to run MAME. The newer more expensive models do have improved CPU power which is beneficial for emulation, especially since the NVIDIA graphics are offloaded to the CPU to save cost. Having used Windows 7 on the Revo, it is worth the few quid extra as it runs far better than you have any right to expect. Vista versions are cheaper, and Linux cheaper still.

The Revo is a great package if you are looking for a discreet PC that you can place in your living room. You can emulate pretty much any classic machine you want and it's all provided in a tiny package.

967 Bananas.

Nice one Chinny, very informative.
I can proof it and stick it on the site as well just for archive purposes if you want.

Nicely done. My folks are getting one of these, so I may ask some advice re getting the crap off. I'm guessing it's just a case of uninstall, but it's probably not.

Chinny, could you test out playback of 720p and 1080p video - preferably Internet Bootleg format, so say, 7Mb/sec H.264 with DTS audio? I could provide some samples. And can it play blurays from your USB player?

I reckon I'll be getting one of these for my parents. They're on the lookout for a new machine & only really use it for browsing, looking at photos & writing emails. It's cheap & should do the job easily Oddly, I have a single cored Atom in my eee (only 1gb of RAM too) & MAME runs fine for the most part. A few games don't work at all, but the majority do with no noticeable hiccups. It could be a older version of MAME that's in the ubuntu (Linux) repositories though.

This is exactly what I want to know, my current media pc draws a fair amount of power, if I can replace it with one of these I will be mr happy

Ah, yes. Power measurements. Can you take any? Is the info available somewhere?

My BluRay player has now gone back to the office and has never actually played a BluRay. I use it for data burning. I have nothing to test it with (although I must get around to authoring a blu-ray).

I don't have any Windows friendly 1080p video to hand, but I do have my company showreel as 720p 11meg Windows Media, and I can report it runs without taxing the CPU at all. Ran it from memory stick which caused occasional CPU spikes of 35%, but in the main the CPU was ticking over at 12%.

A guy on Youtube has recorded some tests on the single core unit and all looks good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3aw1FSqfAU

Also someone has been running a game called Call Of Duty on one, again looks like a single core unit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTLecvn0ijc

Online reviews of the older single core unit suggest 33 watts under load, and less than 25 watts when idling. Another site with geeky Linux people suggests slightly less.

Cheers. Lets see if we can improve it first.

This just reminded me that I have my girlfriend's Mac mini sitting in a cupboard, completely unused for the last 18 months, that could be used for this purpose. Hmmmm... *strokes chin*

(Then again, I mostly emulate Super NES and MegaDrive games, and the Wii does both perfectly with the Homebrew Channel software, with the bonus of being able to use the rather nice Classic Controllers. Errr.)

Both posts on here and comments that (Linda Barker - Ed) has made in the past suggest that many people have lost patience with Mamedev and their bloat and have stuck with older releases that run better on more limited hardware. Linux people are more likely to release an efficient version of the software than some new, but bloated, release.

A mate of mine recently got an Asrock Ion 330 (same spec as Chinny's Revo I think) and was able to watch a 720p Blu-Ray rip without problems in XBMC Live (4354kbps 1280x536 H.264 video, 1509kbps DTS audio). I'll see if I can get him to test some 1080p rips as well.

Nice one Chinny. Very informative

Wow. I didn't read your reply before posting mine.

That's really uncanny. Word for word only you put in a comma instead of a full stop.

Help me, I'm channeling JC!


MORNING ALL.

Wow. This is great stuff.

I'm blown away how cheap that is.

I've my old modded Xbox, but when that gives up the ghost...

You know what? I believe you.

You know what? I believe you.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/19/shut ... 0p-ion-222

Shuttle have entered this market now, looks like a tasty little computer too.

"nettop"? Seriously?

Christ, they're insane small.
They'd make good carputers...

It's not a pleasant portmanteau, admittedly, but I understand what it means; a desktop made out of netbook parts.

I wish they sold one with an internal Bluray drive.

Specs look the same barring the DVD drive option. Can't see if they come bundled with a mouse and keyboard.

The Revo looks more at home in my 8 bit corner though. The Shuttle looks abit boxy. It's bad enough that my Xbox looks like a breeze block.

Couldn't you whack one in yourself though?

It think they're a bit tiddly compared to standard ones.

That's true enough I suppose. It's probably a fairly standard laptop one, although sometimes it can be fiddly to get the right frontpiece. You could also use a USB one of course although it does detract from the sleekness a little.

It has a fair bit more grunt in both GPU and CPU departments.

Although I assume the cost will be far higher if we allow for the usual dollar price x 2 for the UK.

Acer Revo r3610 is $330 on Newegg and £300 on ebuyer. The Shuttle lists on Newegg for $380, so it's 15% more expensive. So no, not far higher, likely to be under £350 in the UK.

Mine was £240 and there are similar models for less. Windows 7 pushes the price up (which I was happy to pay for) but the upgrade to 4gb felt like overkill. No point shoving RAM in for the sake of it if you aren't going to use it.