Old PC System requirements - what's better/cheaper now?

Factual Questions
1

Trying to set up an HTPC for basic videos and old game emulation., especially Sega Saturn.

I have a pile of old Saturn games, but my console is kaput.

I found SSF but am confused by the older system requirements…

Please see below and see if you can help me round this hardware together in today’s market, better hardware and easy/cheap?

Hardware:

*CPU - At least a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz or AMD64. SSF cannot run on a Pentium 3, Duron, Athlon XP or 32bit Semprons (Socket A) due to requiring SSE2 instructions not available in these and older CPUs. A Core 2 Duo E6300 is recommended for full-speed.

Sound card - Most modern sound chips should work fine. Realtek High Definition audio (built into many motherboards) is known to work well.

Graphics card - A fast Direct X 9 compliant graphics card. The SSF author recommended at least a GeForce 6600GT and I too have verified this works perfectly even the AGP version. In theory an ATI/AMD Radeon 9800 should also be fine but I am unable to test this. Intel graphics built in to many laptops and motherboards are too slow to run SSF properly.*

2

All video graphics chips run DirectX 9 … if they say 10 … that includes 9.

The games people should really use a benchmark score…
eg The chip they mentioned can score 100 G3D marks.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+6600+GT

So the info about intel not being good enough gets old.
eg this intel chip scores 2000 G3D Marks, only 20 times more powerful than required.

http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Intel+Iris+Pro+580&id=3481

Moores law and all… cheap graphics chips are actually cpu’s and they are now multi core with 10 times the MHz… so around 20 times faster than the 6600GT referenced.

3

Expensive graphics co-processors now do 10,000 G3D Marks.
So cheap (in built… ) ones should do you …