@Tango said in Newbie - Setting up Arcade Machine, Question about hardware requirements:
Let's say I go for more power. Compared to stock Debian (which, admittedly, I haven't used since about 2008), how hard is it to install RetroPie and setup a version of MAME or FinalBurn on it?
I would say pretty easily, especially if you're already a little familiar with Linux. Even if was a long time ago, the basics didn't change much (I'm using Linux since 2006/2007 myself). Apart from the Pi 3b (no plus) in my upright cabinet, I'm running Retropie on my PC and Laptop with Kubuntu 18.04 and KDE Neon. The only not(ic)able difference is that I have to enter the sudo password on those systems to start RP's setup scripts, whereas the stock Retropie image for the Pi doesn't require that (which is a security issue of course, but depending on your setup more or less negligible).
Retropie installs into /opt, so it doesn't collide with the main system … well, mostly, because it upgrades some packages liks SDL to versions that might break some dependencies, but I can just downgrade them to system state without noticing any problems in Retropie. That said, I'm using a separate user "pi" for Retropie to keep it apart from my everyday user and its $HOME directory.
One day-to-day tip I want to give you is to switch from RP's standard Samba shares to FISH or sshfs over ssh. You could even combine the latter with autofs to mount it automatically on-demand and unmount it again after some idle time. Although encrypted, the file and directory access is much faster than Samba on my systems, and with public key authentication also more secure. See the Docs about how to setup ssh on Retropie. Just remember to de-share or even uninstall Samba after setting up ssh file access to close that then unnecessary rabbit hole. You'll close standard Windows access to RP this way, of course – if that's an issue for you.
