Home Arcade Headache.....Pi over PC?

[opt2not]

The best thing about the Pi is the small footprint. If you're building a smaller cab where fitting all the PC guts inside would prove challenging, a Pi is likely a better choice. 

I would go further and say if you’re building a cab that’s smaller than a bartop, sure use a pi, mister, jakks...any of the miniaturized products. You’re not playing comfortably on those anyway.

But IMO bartop or larger should be PC.

I find it surprising how people have forgotten that we used to use fairly powerful mini-itx PC’s for our bartop projects. Even the weecade, the most cloned bartop design originally used a mini-itx and it was fine then.

[langlem]

RPi’s work great for me regardless the size of cab I am building because I am typically running classics on MAME.  Runs Daphne fine and can run the Golden Tee games up to 2001 Classic good enough. Most of the folks I help build a cab are wanting to play the Pac Man, Centipede and Galagas of the world. 

Really depends on what you are wanting to play.

That being said my project is likely to be a SW Trilogy theme and that will need a few more ponies under the hood.

[leapinlew]

I've used a little of everything. I don't really see a reason why one would be better than the other most of the time. Currently I use three PC's, one 19-n-1, two 60-n-1, and a couple Pi's. I use whatever I think the project needs. If I had to build one tomorrow and it had sufficient space, I'd probably use a x-n-1 for ease, but if it didn't have the games I wanted, I'd use a Pi because I don't have an extra PC and Pis are cheap.