Introduction and Some Questions

[itjoe]

All, great to see so many people share my passion for retro gaming, glad to be a part of the forum.

I'm in the early stages of considering a cabinet build.  I have an old Sony 21" CRT TV (PAL) (no SVideo, but has Scart), a Pentium 4 2.8GHz PC with 1GB RAM and an ATI 9800 128Mb graphics card.  I also have a Rasberry Pi but initial testing has concluded that it does not have enough processing power to support my requirements.

Initially moderately successful testing has meant I am able to run MAME32 on Windows 7 with an output to my TV - great.  So far it has played everything I want to get working on it, Gauntlet, Final Fight, Street Fighter II, Salamander etc.  But this is only part of the battle, considering I've not touched any power tools yet and my garage is bereft of any timber.

My requirements for the machine are:

It needs to support two players
It needs to be roughly 100% standard arcade cabinet size
I want it to have all the proper marquees and side art (I'm yet to find a UK supplier for this stuff - any suggestions?)
I would like it to boot directly to a MAME frontend (so GroovyMAME LiveCD is very interesting)
Ideally I'd use the CRT TV, but I would consider using a 20" LCD

Having tested GroovyArcade-Arch2012.03.25-i686.iso, I can get it to boot into GASetup, but it doesn't seem to be able to load the frontend, so lines of code fill the screen, the last of which says something about the server exiting, then I'm back at GASetup.  I'm unclear at this point whether the frontend is indeed on the CD, or if I need to select my own, again, any guidance here would be appreciated.  As a point of interest I have followed the guide on the GroovyMAME site and the menu options are slightly different to those pictured.

Very many thanks to anyone who has any comments or suggestions on the above, and in the meantime I'll keep you all informed of my progress.

[itjoe]

Keen eyed retro gamers among you will have immediately noticed my fully intentional reference to GroovyMAME.  Obviously this was a test (which you have all passed) and the correct reference is GroovyArcade.

 

[EMDB]

Welcome...

You can Boot into any frontend on Windows 7. There is a lot of tricks on this forum to hide the windows operating system if you want.

[itjoe]

Thanks for your response EMDB, that could be cool, and in that case something like HyperSpin might work well.