Minumum specs for an Emulator-only PC?

My GF is into old-school games, NES, Super NES, Genesis, etc...plus I like a lot of them too, so I was thinking of buying a cheap used desktop (probably one of the business type "flat" desktops that are shaped kind of like gaming consoles) and putting nothing but emulators on it, and hooking it up to the PC input on my TV, sort of making an ultimate old school game machine...a PS2 emulator would prolly be the most powerful I would put on it, so what would be the minimum specs I would probably need on this PC to run all the older console emus?

Get a comp that has at least 3.0 Ghz. Preferably 3.6-4.0 Ghz. I hear a lot of emulation fans love the Intel Duo Core E8600 3.33 and then overclocking it to 4.0 Ghz. I would avoid quad core if your only gonna use it for emulation and stick with overclocking the duo core and getting it to 4.0 Ghz if you want only emulators on it.E8400 (3.0Ghz), E8500 (3.16 Ghz) & E8600 (3.33 Ghz) processors. The 8600 is priced considerably higher than the 8400 and 8500 for only a minor boost in speed. Either processor will provide oustanding performance

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PS2 emulator would prolly be the most powerful I would put on it

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FYI: This emulators require the most out of the others. Take this off the list and you can save a lot. dolphin also likes a beefy system but not as much as the ps2 emulator. Though "NES, Super NES, Genesis, etc" can be done with a very simple system.

Yeah, if you forget about a PS2 emulator, you can run many of the older 80's arcade games on a very simple box. The very first MAME machine I built ran off a 100Mhz AMD with 32Mb of ram. I've consistently had good luck buying a older pc's from craigslist for about $50 and going with those.

I am looking to purchase a system that I will use exclusively for emulation gaming as well. I really don't want to build one from scratch. Any suggestions on where to buy a good system that won't cost a fortune? While I will mostly play old school games, I may end up running more high-end emulation after I get into it, so I guess I should get a system that would be able to do it all if I can afford one. There are many desktops available on Newegg, for example, but a lot of them have integrated graphics, so they won't work. Thanks!

actually, on-die graphics cards are getting pretty good, so you could probably even do Gamecube emulation with it, but yeah, in general they aren't that great. It might be hard trying to find a desktop computer that will do high-end emulation justice, If you have a Microcenter around where you live, you could probably find a good computer for cheap. Sometimes a pretty good build shows up on Ebay, but I wouldn't trust the shipping.

Thanks. Ok, let's forget about high-end then. I've never played a playstation 2 in real life; I don't see why I'd want to start emulating it now! What I'd really want to be sure I could do without any problems (at least no problems caused by my system anyway) would be the following:

MAME
NES
SNES
N64
Sega Genesis
Playstation 1

For MAME, I would mostly only be interested in the older games I may have played as a kid, so probably nothing after the early '90s (except whatever Golden Tee is available - gotta have that). Any ideas now? And thanks a lot. I've been doing my best to research, but I'm pretty new.