I've been playing around a lot with RetroPie recently - I built myself a full-size arcade cabinet and everything. I started it running on a RaspberryPi, but recently upgraded to a cheap used Dell OptiPlex.
Right now, Dreamcast seems to be the sweetspot for hardware emulation. A sub-$100 PC (on the used market, anyway) can easily emulate a Dreamcast (for all the games I've tried, anyway - Tony Hawk 2, DOA 2, etc), possibly even with extra cycles to provide extra video smoothing to get rid of jaggies that are pretty obvious at its normal resolution.
So yeah, I think this would be possible. I wouldn't think the IP for the hardware would be an issue since it's all emulated, it's just down to the BIOS and the games themselves.
Can you expand on what tutorial or steps you took to build your own arcade cabinet? I'd be curious to see pictures or the actual internals. Did you install standard cabinet joysticks and buttons as well?
Here [1] is an album showing the final product, and the build.
I cheated and used a TankStick, but now I wish I hadn't. I think I could have managed the wiring, and it would have gone a long way aesthetically to integrate it all.
I designed the cabinet myself, but that was inspired by the "Vigolix" design [2]. I scaled it up to a full 6', put in a lighted marquee, added a drawer for keyboard and mouse.
The gross assembly took me 4-5 days, but a total of about a month overall because of the time to paint, dry, and sand many coats. Plus, of course, the amount of time to set up the computer hardware and software.
Right now, Dreamcast seems to be the sweetspot for hardware emulation. A sub-$100 PC (on the used market, anyway) can easily emulate a Dreamcast (for all the games I've tried, anyway - Tony Hawk 2, DOA 2, etc), possibly even with extra cycles to provide extra video smoothing to get rid of jaggies that are pretty obvious at its normal resolution.
So yeah, I think this would be possible. I wouldn't think the IP for the hardware would be an issue since it's all emulated, it's just down to the BIOS and the games themselves.