DIY arcade & arcade1up pinball revisited

I’m interested in the A1up pinball but have a hard time justifying it to myself at full price after I scored 5 cabinets for pretty cheap. I got myself an M93p tiny and was going to see if I could run Sega Model 3 on it (doubtful) but the pandemic has slowed everything down for me on that front. I’m an ER doc and I’ve been just exhausted between work and childcare (toddler at home). I bought a LaunchBox license on Black Friday when it was discounted and want to try it out but it might not be until February that I get any time. So essentially almost a year since I’ve done much with my arcades.

I did get a digital marquee for my TMNT mod and followed a tutorial to add a raspberry pi 0 to put the corresponding marquee up with whatever game is selected. However, I need to go in and rename all of the marquee files I have to match the rom file names. I also read about multimon to have it all go off of the one raspberry pi 4 but haven’t delved too deep.

One neat thing I did was, using a design by u/legochuck on Reddit, I modified his 3d model and outfitted my mod to be able to switch between a 4 way and 8 way joystick from the top. I was gonna fine tune it and load it to thingiverse but, you know, pandemic.

Thank you for starting the original thread since it got me interested in all this stuff in the first place.

I have a 7 year old that I would love to build a arcade machine for. Any good beginner resources I should be looking at or recommendations on where to start?