You would actually be surprised how quickly you totally just get used to playing games like Defender and Asteroids on a stock Street Fighter control layout. There is nothing inherently superior to the strange button patterns those games came with to just a normal button bank.
Full disclosure, I own both Asteroids and Defender machines, so I am quite familiar with playing them with both the original controls and Mame.
You mean stick plus 6 buttons, 3 over 3? How would that even work, Asteroids pretty much needs 2 buttons side-by-side for left/right and 2 buttons side-by-side for thrust/fire. I suppose hyperspace could go anywhere (no pun intended). Similarly, Defender needs a reverse thumb button near the stick but the 6 fighter buttons would work for the rest. I'm not arguing or disagreeing, although it kinda sounds like it, I'm just not following how you are doing it and I'm trying to understand.
I know you said its set, but I would keep looking for a better (cheap) pc--dual cores can be had all day long for cheap (free) nowadays--just remember mame favours individual processor speed over number of processors--its all the other windows crap that gets helped with multiple cores...and if you use hyperspin as your front end, you will need something pretty beefy for it to run and boot quickly and smoothly..other front ends are less graphics intensive and so need less resources.
That said, if you go with mame .37b5 or something like that--old pc's and skinny front ends on an XP box run just fine.
I'm actually running a fairly lightweight Linux distribution, Xubuntu. Not the lightest you can get, but it's fairly easy on resources. I'm running Attract-Mode for the front end, not hyperspin which I've heard is a resource hog and only runs in Windows anyway. I considered using the video previews, but for now I'm sticking with screenshots. I may try the videos later, but I want to keep resource use down.
On the other hand, I'm running the latest version of Mame, 0.183. I had planned to stick with .160 as i understand it's the last version before they added new features which also require more overhead, but somewhere along the line I switched up to the newest. I realize a 1.2Ghz dual core Celeron 857 is a low end low power mobile cpu, but it seems to be working out ok. It has 2G ram and a 60G SSD. I have another 2G ram I'll probably pop in, although I doubt it will make much difference. I'm not ruling out a new pc in the future, but for now this one really does seem to be working just fine.
I know you said its set, but I would keep looking for a better (cheap) pc--dual cores can be had all day long for cheap (free) nowadays--just remember mame favours individual processor speed over number of processors--its all the other windows crap that gets helped with multiple cores...and if you use hyperspin as your front end, you will need something pretty beefy for it to run and boot quickly and smoothly..other front ends are less graphics intensive and so need less resources.
That said, if you go with mame .37b5 or something like that--old pc's and skinny front ends on an XP box run just fine.
I am running .106 on a 15 year old computer, and it runs everything relevant at full speed.
Of course newer mame versions bring better emulation, but that better emulation is often invisible to the end user and .106 on intel is better than anything on an Arm processor.
FWIW, you show 1G ram and an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ in your video. I checked benchmarks for it, average cpu mark on cpubenchmark.net is 370 with a single thread rating of 578 , and my celeron shows up with 1170 average cpu mark and 633 single thread rating. I know, blah blah blah, numbers numbers numbers. Basically, you confirmed that I should be fine with my current setup as long as I don't want the newest CHD based games or try emulating other game consoles.
BTW, I ordered my buttons and such last night, should be here in a few days. I went back and forth, changed my mind again and again, and at one point or another each of these 3 were "the one I'm going to buy" until I eventually just ordered one.
IPAC USB keyboard encoder - This seems like the best option. IPAC 4 would give all the connections I'd ever need, it's setup for MAME by default but configurable. It's also the most expensive (although the cost of the board is only a tiny fraction of the total cost) and the most confusing for a newbie. Confusing in the sense of figuring out which buttons and joysticks to buy or what else is needed (rolls of what size wire??).. I think it would also make for the cleanest install the way you run wires and cut to fit. Didn't buy one.
Zero Delay USB joystick encoder - Seems like a very good option. Able to buy and setup 1 player at a time as they show up as a joystick device. I found a number of kits but I wasn't completely happy with any of them. I started making a list of buttons/joysticks to order with a couple of these encoder boards... The biggest plus is also the one downside, joysticks and not keyboard encoder. I really want tab and esc and a couple other keyboard keys. I can work around it, re-config mame, but still... Did not order this, but there is a good chance I will later. Seems an easy thing to add when I want more players.
X-arcade DIY kit - $70 for 2 player kit plus another $50 for a trackball. It seems as though a lot of the older complaints I found have been addressed in the last year or two - smarter better encoder board, improved button quality. I figure this is a good middle of the road, easy for the beginner, reasonably priced kit with everything I need so this is what I ordered. I was very hesitant at first because it only supports 2 players and I may want 3 or even 4 players. Finding and reading about the ZD setup makes the 2 player limitation of the X-arcade a non-issue. I can always add ZD joysticks with up to 12 buttons each and no button/key conflicts with the X-arcade stuff.