How much horsepower do I need

[vader]

Building a simple bartop vertical machine with one joystick and couple action buttons, one and two player, coin buttons and maybe some hidden buttons.  I know I can go the GPIO route for connection, but I may just pick up a IPAC2 to make things simple and give one of our vendors some business.   I already have a decased monitor, 20" 1680x1050 which I'll have to decide on letting it run in 4:3 or stretched.

What will I need to run Retropie or something simple that is already set up with a nice distro ( don't know much about what is out there ) to run mainly 80's arcade games, not interested in console games ?  I have a Pi 2 but not sure if that will struggle.

Thanks

[mahuti]

Ipac will work very well and is simple to use with a Pi. That said, I often use a Picade X Hat instead to handle inputs, joysticks, power button and audio,  which I really like. https://www.adafruit.com/product/3402

Rpi2 will work fine with Retropie with older games on Mame2003.

Instead of running the monitor  stretched you can show the original bezels around the outside of the games, though this can eat some processor up.

If you decide to upgrade to Rpi3 or Rpi4, you will get a lot more performance. Any cables you have for your Pi2 will work on the 3. The Pi4 requires a few different things, so if you go up to a pi3b+ it's basically just a $35 upgrade. Worth it in my opinion

[vader]

I ended up getting a Pi 3b+, it's been doing great with a zero delay encode    I'm thinking about building another panel and will probably source everything from Ultimarc,  Andy has treated me good in the past.



Plan on doing a 2 player, 6 buttons each with spinner and trackball.  Don't plan on any lighting.   Need to researching since things have changed so much in the past 10 years.

[mahuti]

Where the hardware is concerned I havent really found that much different over the last 10 years... at least when used with the RPi. If you're ordering from Ultimarc I really like the u360 with stiffer springs. When used with RGB Commander it can auto shift modes based on the selected game.

Ive had zero issues with running single versions of any of the following on RPi

Apac
Ipac2
Ipac4
Jpac
Opti-pac
Opti-wiz (multiple iterations)
Led-Wiz
Zero-delay
Picade X-Hat
U360 Joystick and input controller.

I've had issues with the following but those issues can be simply fixed with hid-quirks
GPwiz49
GPWiz40
Though I've written some basic software to control both of the above, it's not ready for primetime really, so I dont recommend them.

Still can't recommend this.. yet. Nothing good out there to use it as BOTH a gamepad and led output, though it does a fine job when used as one OR the other.
LedWiz+Gp

Also a few things to note:

1.  running 2 zero delay units requires a hid quirk set up or they both control player 1. You may run into this with a variety of devices. Usually his quirks can fix this.
2. Retroarch doesnt recognize 2 trackballs... just one.
3. 2 spinners are fine but I believe you have to use up/down for one and left/right axis for the other.
4. One of the MAME versions doesnt support enough inputs (mame4all maybe??)... so using a keyboard encoder for 2 players doesn't work... something like 16 inputs max per input device. So keep that in mind when choosing your default mame vs. to use. If you stick with Mame2003 you should be fine.

[zestyphresh]

I recently built something similar using a Pi2 and it is probably borderline in terms of performance, with the obvious caveat it does depend what you want to play.

I would recommend the Picade X-Hat if you're only going with a single player. It also adds a power button and amplifier, which considering the price is excellent value.