PC specs and where to buy

Hi!

[I originally posted this message in a thread started by someone else in the General Gaming section, but I didn?t get any responses, so hopefully this will work better.]

I am looking to purchase a system that I will use exclusively for gaming, probably in an arcade cabinet. I really don't want to build a PC from scratch. Any suggestions on where to buy a good system that won't cost a fortune? I can customize one at CyberpowerPC or IBuyPower, but I?d need to know what components to go with. I guess what I really need to know is: 1)what CPU do I need, 2)what GPU do I need, 3)how much RAM?

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 ? mostly games from the early ?90s or before, plus whatever Golden Tee is available
NES
SNES
N64
Sega Genesis
Playstation 1

Thanks a lot for any input. I?ve tried to research this, but there is a lot of conflicting info out there so it can be confusing.

You can no longer buy a computer ( at this day in time ) that woudl not be powerful enough to run those emulators. I used to run them on a 700 something cpu back in the day. I dont think you can even buy a computer that slow anymore. There really is nothing confusing about it, what conflicts do you mean? I emulate that stuff on my phone LOL.

Great, thanks! I wasn't clear on the MAME specs needed. I know some later games require pretty heavy hardware to emulate (some of the Street Fighter games, I think?), so I wasn't clear on when they started to get more intensive. Also, I wasn't sure about Playstation 1 emulation and if that took more power.

"90s or before" around 1 gig CPU no problem ( accept some of the 3D intense games ). You could use Zync for that. 90+, you better step it up a bit.

PS1 run fine for my on a 800 something CPU in the day.