Joysticks with onboard PC - opinions?

[zorrobandito]

So, I have a couple of Street Fighter 15th Anniversary sticks and I want to add an onboard PC to output direct to a TV.

The Fit-PC3 Pro model seems to fit the bill - it's small, fanless and has HDMI (w/audio) out. It has an AMD G-T56N (64 bit dual core) - 1.65 GHz CPU should be enough to hit Model 2 speeds if not Model 3 emulation. Graphics are provided by a Radeon HD 6320 that has the requisite pixel shading and polygon shifting grunt to handle various emulators.

The joysticks will daisy chain via USB as well as allowing a keyboard and network socket for modification.

The PSU is an external brick which, combined with the HDMI cable, makes the unit far from wireless but an onboard battery is not practical.  

The Fit-PC passively cools through the case, so some kind of ventilation system will be required but the sticks have a lot of empty space in them...

Any thoughts, opinions, gotchas?

[paigeoliver]

You would have to go with a solid state drive or else you would kill the hard drive rather quickly.

[TopJimmyCooks]

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=112723.0

some examples.  at least a couple of those have build threads here.

[zorrobandito]

Thanks for the info!

I agree with the SSD requirement and it is part of my plan. Also for the load times - the last thing I want is to be waiting for my joystick to boot!

[paigeoliver]

The bios/post can take more time than anything. My Win XP equipped mame cabinet with a hard drive (old gear, like 6 or 7 years old) boots faster than my SSD equipped Windows 7 desktop. The desktop just farts around in the bios/post forever before it actually starts booting windows (boots in about 5 seconds once it actually starts).

Thanks for the info!

I agree with the SSD requirement and it is part of my plan. Also for the load times - the last thing I want is to be waiting for my joystick to boot!