Honesty table
Capability ceiling
Established during scoping, before anything was built. This is the governing constraint on what a suite may contain: not a benchmark result, and not subject to revision by tuning.
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B · BCM2837 · 1GB LPDDR2 shared with GPU
Scrolls sideways on a narrow screen.
| Tier | Platform | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Comfortable | PS1, SNES, Mega Drive, GBA, NES, arcade (pre-CPS3) | Full speed expected |
| Marginal | N64, PSP | Playable single-player; degrades in split-screen |
| Out of reach | Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, Xbox | Insufficient CPU/GPU |
| Out of reach | Any x86 PC title (box86 + Wine) | Insufficient RAM and CPU |
Where the arcade line falls
CPS3 sits above the ceiling
CPS1 and CPS2 titles are fine. CPS3 is above the practical ceiling and the sets that need it are excluded. That costs the library Street Fighter III: Third Strike, and the exclusion stands anyway.
The part that gets argued
These are not tuning problems
Sixth-generation emulation on a BCM2837 with a gigabyte of shared RAM does not become viable with a different core, a lighter frontend, or a higher clock. Overclocking is refused outright; it is not on the table as a way to move a row up this table.
Titles that have no fifth-generation release at all are removed from scope for that reason and no other. They are held against a Pi 4 or Pi 5, on a hardware-upgrade backlog rather than a wish list. That backlog is not scheduled.
A ceiling that quietly rises to meet whatever someone wants to play is not a ceiling. Watching for exactly that drift is part of how this project is run.
Known constraints
The rest of the envelope
Ethernet shares bandwidth with USB on the LAN9514, so realistic throughput is 5 to 8 MB/s. Thermal throttling starts at 80 °C; heatsinks are fitted and behaviour under sustained load is unmeasured until Phase 0 says otherwise. Swap stays disabled, because a microSD card is not a place to page.
Projected from CONOPS.md sections 2, 3, 4.6 and 7. Checked 2026-08-27.