Ask HN: Building a Art Arcade

Hey all, a friend asked me to write a small game for an art installation. The thought is a simple arcade-like game in a 16-bit style running on a Raspberry Pi 4. It just needs to store high scores so the SD card can run in read-only or append. Since it's an art install, it needs to run 24/7 for a few months if not a year or two while being interacted with by the public. I'm evaluating a few different options:

- Writing a simple bare-metal OS that runs on the hardware, no OS to worry about.

- Leveraging a slimmed-down OS like Ubuntu Core or Raspberry OS Lite and doing a godot/pygame project (Godot seems somewhat of an unsupported path).

- Retropie/others (I worry about this approach since I just want to run the one game and I'm worried about being able to exit out and break the illusion).

Any suggestions or recommendations? Does anyone have any experience with writing an arcade game/running in a continual fashion? I won't be there to fix it if it goes wrong, so reliability is key.