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