I meant that, IMO, if he's got the smarts (or the crazies ) to work on 500KV, I doubt he would be satisfied with simply taking the easy way out with a laptop and USB joystick.
That's kinda like this: View attachment 113089
I do appreciate all you've said. It will take some time for me to understand most of it,lol.. I just wanted to use my laptop to practice some arduino. I didnt have the download on that raspberry yet for arduino and the monitor was being used by my 8yr old for far more important things. Atari hahaa
FWIW, I did (sorta) take the easy way out with a retro arcade system.
SWMBO is a demon on Ms Pacman and really kicks my ass. She won't play anything else, but is happy to sit playing for ages.
I ordered a dual arcade stick kit from Banggood: https://www.banggood.com/Arcade-LED...-Push-Buttons-p-1156368.html?cur_warehouse=CN
and made up a 2 player console to use with MAME:
Sorry, but I didn't take photos of the rest of the construction, or the completed console. It is finished and working, the covering was done with black contact paper and looks kinda decent.
MAME was installed on an old Thinkpad and we can hook it up to the tv or projector with a HDMI cable.
However, for portability, a Pi would be far better and definitely adds to the cool-factor for a youngster and his/her friends.
Even easier way to do something like this is via the RetroPie image which you can get at https://retropie.org.uk/ note that it doesn't come with ANY roms, games etc... you'll have to Google for those.