Each user has their own requirements. I've tried alternatives, but only RetroPie has met 100% of my needs.

For me, the great community, the quick troubleshooting, the well-written wiki, the ability to configure everything, based on Debian ... make it the best choice.

Well...i thought i updated my laptop, but as it turns out as im on it now i did not and its on RetroArch 1.71. Ill do an update and see what happens...My pi 3b+ works even with my current overclocking tests so if things go south...

I did reinstall retropie on all 3 machines. My method of testing involved stripping the drive of its partition table, install my OS of choice (deb based of course), and then i installed retropie. Nothing else in between.

Edit: More info

I was wrong on that. Its RetroArch 1.7.1 on the desktop machine, but i was able to unfortunatly recreate this on the pi by doing an apt update, apt upgrade.
It upgraded a few things such as the bootloader and the kernel, but as im watching it it seemed to have partially removed xpad - i say partially because it stated removing xpad and blah blah, but then in the retropie setup script it showed it as installed. Im not sure which action if not both caused the issue, but reinstalling xpad after a reboot did not resolve it.

So my Pi no longer works in Retroarch for player one. Does anyone know of any fixes for this, incompatabilities, bugs within the newest kernel or anything of the sort?
It is entirely possible that i did the same on the desktop before doing that second reboot so im kinda leaning toward it being kernel issue since xpad was NOT installed.

@kchaos The Latte Panda has an intel CPU or you could get an Intel NUC. These would both use the x86 architecture.
SOC, means system on a chip.

Supposing you have already Emulationstation + Retroarch running, you first have to enter the Retroarch menu and download the mednafen_saturn core. Then you need to paste this:

<system>
<fullname>Sega Saturn</fullname>
<name>saturn</name>
<path>~.emulationstation\roms\saturn</path> this is the path to your roms directory
<extension>.iso .ISO .mdf .MDF .cue .CUE</extension>
<command>%HOME%.emulationstation\systems\retroarch\retroarch.exe -L %HOME%.emulationstation\systems\retroarch\cores\mednafen_saturn_libretro.dll "%ROM_RAW%"</command> this is where you tell ES what core to use
<platform>saturn</platform>
<theme>saturn</theme>
</system>

in your es_systems.cfg file; beware of slashes/backslashes and all depending of which OS you're running.

Secondly, you'll need to put the proper BIOS file in the retroarch/system directory, see here:

https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Saturn

And then of course you need to put all your roms in your roms directory.

If you don't want to go the retroarch route, I guess you can use the standalone mednafen but I have no experience with it.