Which OS? Looking for advice...

[Visitor Q]

I am currently still running Vista 64 bit on my arcade cab and starting to see some limitations. For instance HS 1.51 is not supported and a few of the newer emulators like TeknoParrot. I am considering upgrading to Windows 7 64bit and was wondering if that was a good OS for HS in general as well as the current state of Emulators. Probably going to try and upgrade rather than a clean install at this point in hopes that I will not have to do a lot of reconfiguration.

[Andyman]

Win7 64-bit is what I run. No issues of any kind with the 54 systems in my setup.

[Visitor Q]

Well that's good to know. It seems with Vista I can't run the new version of Mame either, I'm stuck at 1.96. It looks like I can get a copy of Win 7 Pro for $25 bucks too which I don't mind shelling out for otherwise I would find one "elsewhere". I'm also thinking that my current setup should handle that OS too as I doubt it is much more demanding than Vista.

[SubRetro]

Windows 10 runs very well nowadays on my setup. I did run it briefly on Windows 7 but its become a bit more of a pain to setup. Windows 10 is working well even on older hardware but if your running Vista then chances are your current hardware might be very old. 

[dark13]

If you are using a dx12 videocard windows10 is the best choice. Even 1809 works good right now IF you disable (or create exceptions) windows defender. Sadly boot cannot be completely customized like windows7 but w10 is generally faster. Probably a good choice for an arcade/HTPC is w10 enterprise 1809 LTSC (less crapware and it gets only security update). These days on ebay you can find cheap OEM genuine key.