Hardware help

[Scrappysphinx]

Hi all, apologies if I've posted in the wrong section but here goes.

Im completely new to arcade cabs but recently picked up a bartop locally really cheap that had a dead Pentium 4 in it. 

I've removed the dead pc and am left with the cab, controls and screen.

I have purchased launchbox premium and hoping to use bigbox to cobble together some sort of bartop system that I can just boot up and play.

I'm not too fussed about huge Mame arcade setups I'm think more along the line of old cart based consoles I.e.

Atari 2600/Lynx, Sega SMS, MD (or genesis for US members), NES, SNES, PCE etc. I'm thinking up to maybe the sega cd/Saturn (I'm not sure on good Saturn emulation is) but want to avoid anything that needs analog sticks, I.e sticking with systems that had basic dpad + buttons controllers.

I'm looking for suggestions on the hardware recommended for this sort of setup

I have to hand a HP Elitebook 8440p laptop which is a first gen i7-720 cpu with an nVidia NVS 3100m graphics chip, 8GB ddr3 ram and 500gb samsung evo ssd. This machine has a broken screen so is sitting doing nothing, would this be powerful enough? I've been reading that the bigbox wheel/carousel can require a decent GPU so not sure if the 3100m would be man enough?

Alternatively I've seen an itx i3-4130 with 4GB ram available for about £60 and was thinking I could combine that with something like a 2GB 1030 or something, would that be a better option?

Thanks for any suggestions :)

[Headrush69]

As much as I love LB, I think buying better hardware just for it might not be worth it. Except for Sega Saturn, those systems you listed can run fine with even a Raspberry Pi. That laptop would be fine as well. I think the biggest issue you will have is supporting cocktail mode. MAME does this, but I don't know of any console emulators do. It doesn't really make sense that they would.

How big of a collection of console games do you expect to have? 

Edit: You wrote bar top, my mind read cocktail.... ignore the cocktail stuff.

Edited March 20, 2020 by Headrush69

[Scrappysphinx]

Hi, so this is what i have. As you can see there is a button in the corner which was wired up to the Pentium 4 pc's power button, the joystick and 6 buttons, then there is 2 buttons on the front (the middle black front is a 2 port usb panel mount). The screen is a 15" dell VGA monitor, it has a small set of speakers internally terminating in a 3.5mm jack. 

I basically just want the turn on and be presented with the wheel/carousel to be able to pick a system and play a game. I tried setting up hyperspin (again i'm new to all this) but i couldn't get it to work with the joystick/buttons correctly and it was quite laggy when scrolling the menus.

If the laptop will do what i want then thats awesome. I did also consider using an original xbox with coinops and emulators since i have lots around and have upgraded a few of them to 128mb ram and 500gb/1Tb sata hdd's.

I do also have a raspberry pi 3 i could use but i found it quite slow, i.e. i select a system and game, the game loads but it takes a good 5 minutes or so for the controls to respond once the game loads and I have had issues with file system corruption on multiple occasions. 

I am currently trying to set up Launchbox/Big Box on my main gaming pc (i7-9700k GTX 2080) pc and then move it onto the intended hardware (i assume i can just copy the launchbox folder over to a different hdd and run it?).

You can see the BigBox menu i currently have in the second pic.

The full list of systems i am hoping to run are listed below and i am expecting to have a full rom set for each game. CD based systems could be dropped if needed. 

• Atari 2600
• Atari Lynx
• Master System
• Megadrive/Genesis
• 32x
• Sega CD
• Game Gear
• Gameboy/Color/Advance
• Nes
• Snes
• PC Engine
• PC Engine CD
• Saturn (possible but not set)