i used for my brothers bartop a rasberry pi 2 + 32gb sd card just a 10 class installed retropie + emulation station with it . nes snes sega 8bit and 16 bit will work too also atari and older works just perfect same goes for gameboy. but to be honest all you really want is to run mame .. the pi2 will run it as long as you dont load your card over 2000 games this is really max not that it wont play more but the loading of the game art is jut really slow when going over 2000 games the newer pi3 is just better and faster i would reccomend to buy this.
before all this whe where building arcades with the pi1 wich will work it is just a lot slower.
for the joysticks the easyest way i found is to use the ipac 2 interface trew usb hook up your controls and bamm your playing.
good luck with your build sammy