Beginner needs help choosing a board.

Hello, I'm new to this so sorry if I'm posting in the wrong area or in the wrong format.

I plan to set up a gaming machine (SNES era style using a gutted old console or 3d printed shell as the base) using a SBC that can use an emulator, play modern 2d games (such as shovel knight, spelunky or hyper light drifter) and play movies.

I was initially attracted to the Raspberry Pi as the most obvious option but from what I understand, the ARM architecture makes it incompatible with most windows games.

Would I be better off using a raspberry Pi and using Exagear to run x86 games through wine or purchasing an x86 SBC? It seems that most of the x86 boards are much more expensive...

What would also be ideal is an external storage system in the form of micro SDs or something similar. What board would you recommend and what advice would you give?

Would I be able to use a raspberry pi, and use separate SD cards for a distro with exagear and for Retropie (or similar program)?

Welcome to LQ.

As I read it, you want to run windows games under linux. I see SNES in there, and that's old, 1990s or even 1980s. Please clarify your requirements

* Are you trying to run legacy games from the last millenium under a SNES emulator?
* Are you trying to run more modern windows games, or very modern ones?
* Would you require M$ windows in a VM?

Generally speaking, games are extremely resource hungry and demanding of CPU, GPU, ram & storage. Forget SBCs, all arm based devices unless you're in the last millenium. Most of these games have a startup routine that asks "What have we here?" and hogs resources and adjusts your game accordingly, so it will play on a crappy pc but only look good on a beast.

Mention specific emulators and games you plan to use in your reply.

Thanks for the quick reply and sorry for the confusion. I meant that I wished to run legacy games on an emulator, and to run modern 2d games (most likely through a windows virtual machine), on two separate SD cards - one for an emulator, one for running windows. What I'm more concerned with though is the windows games. Is this possible on an ARM based SBC like the raspberry Pi, and if not, would it be possible on a x86 board?

I found Exagear, which claims to play games like fallout and counter-strike relatively smoothly on a raspberry Pi - and though I don't plan to play either of these, I thought that meant it would be able to handle simple 2d games, even modern ones.

I plan to play Crawl, Curses n Chaos, Shovel knight and similar games through Exagear, as well as to play Castlevania: aria of sorrow on Gameboy Advance through Retropie and games like Asteroids for Atari.

Thanks for the help!

This is elementary stuff you could find on google.

Arm processors aren't at the races for x86 games, or VMs. Very little is coded for arm cpus. I'm not a gamer myself, but I can read. SD Cards aren't at the races as storage for games; usb isn't fast enough. A fast (ssd) disk does 500Meg/sec minimum.

Use a beast of a modern x86_64 pc and throw money at every peripheral - video, ram, mouse, joystick, earphones, soundcard. Never mind today's & yesterday's games; If you're buying, waste money buying tomorrow's obsolete junk or waste money buying something that will play tomorrow's games. Don't ask about compromises, because that's your call entirely.

Thanks.