Software

Since the machine I managed to scare up for this was a pretty low-spec throwaway.  I figured the best way to squeeze every last bit of performance out of it was to go with DOS.  For those who have never had the experience mucking about with DOS it's a huge pain - things collide or crash or just don't work for no reason, drivers largely don't exist, memory management sucks, etc.

Rather than trying to strip down and manage an old version of Windows, I installed FreeDOS 1.0.  This is a pretty neat DOS clone that aims to replace MS-DOS with a compatible-but-extended version.  It worked out decently but the system is pretty fragile - EMM386 can crash at very bizarre times, like when attempting to use the 'shutdown' or 'restart' commands.  No worries, I just quit the FE and hit the power switch.

My frontend is ArcadeOS 2.5.2.  It's old and crusty but it works, mostly.  Seems the ACPI or APM or whatever powersave causes the thing to crash.  Also the screensaver is highly unreliable and often crashes out.  I've been thinking about trying one of the other frontends off byoacwiki ( http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Front-Ends ) but the effort involved in making change to the system at this point means I am unlikely to give it a shot.

The version of MAME I am using is dmamepp .106, the last DOS version available (at least before the Big Video Rewrite that slowed things down considerably).  This was hard to track down.  I eventually located a version optimized for i686 at http://www.emu-france.com/?page=fichiers&idMachine=66 - and even then this build is not so good, because it does not support any command-line switches without a game name supplied (segfaults instead).  To extract the game list I ended up tracking down Mame32 .106 and running -listxml, then using that XML in place of whatever dmamepp would've supplied.

Other stuff that I have on here:

* cwsdpmi - a requirement for running arcadeos

* sound blaster drivers - to get my sound card working

* scitech display doctor - which actually provides a performance boost by enabling some better features of my gfx card!

If you're going to go with a DOS arcade cab, you owe it to yourself to check out this site:  http://dosmame.mameworld.info/  One of the best (only) dosmame resources left standing.

UPDATE:  In the time since I've had this set up, I managed to correct the emm386 issues and get APM reboot working.  Also, the ArcadeOS screensaver "Lens" is in fact unstable, but "Screens" works perfecly, so I got that going too.

It is still not easy to add more games to the system, or other emulators (I tried to get Z26 working, without success).  I have ideas on how this could be handled - mostly, by replacing my MAME executable with defMAME instead - though that is definitely work for a rainy day.