jukingeo - havn't seen a corrupted card in a while on my RPI1.
For games on the RPI1 you want final burn alpha & mame4all.
Mame4all was one of the first programs I tried for the Raspi and I didn't care for it because vector games looked terrible and the front end was 'blah'. Plus I had troubles with it too.
Mame4all is based off 37b roms & i found .72 version roms to work well with FBA. You should be good on performance with those two.
advanced mame on rpi1 is hit or miss performance wise.
Well, I had a rather lengthy post up on the Raspberry Pi site if you care to take a look at the trials and tribulations I have had with getting Mame to work with the Raspi:
http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=44667I did manage to get it to work, but every so often it would still blow the SD card. Of course I do have backups but since I was testing the feasibility of using a Raspi for a cabinet build. Let's just say it flunked the test. I just simply can't have it blowing SD cards constantly.
I was running classic 4-away verticals on my rpi1 with mame4all just fine.
Actually i couldn't find a game I cared about on the .37b romset that didn't run full speed.
Advanced mame was hit and miss. Galaga 88 for example was slow with advancedmame.
gyruss also.
In that thread a fellow helped me out with a 'special build' of AdvMame that actually did work pretty fast and looked good with Vector games, but as I said the issue that I had was that it just seemed very unstable and the SD card would become corrupted and I had to start all over again. It's all in that thread I posted.
The biggest annoyance with vertical games is emulationstation doesn't rotate or supports vertical themes & rotating the pi itself can cause performance issues so you are pretty much stuck with advmenu and for some reason I can't change the aspect of the tile's in the menu so all my vert screenshots/movies are squished.
If I could find another simple front end for the RPI1 it would def. go in the dedicated vertical 4-way cab i'm building.
I have not even gotten that far. I was just doing regular tests on a horizontal screen.
on the RPI2 I've mostly been testing the 8-way horizontal because I know those require more power with advmame and i've been happy so far with performance.
I havn't had time to run through all the games i'm interested in playing in cab yet but havn't seen too many issues so far and emulationstation2 is a nice looking front end.
It really comes down to what games you want to play and if they run fullspeed.
As I mentioned in that post I linked to, I am pretty much running games prior to 1988 and even then I concentrate mostly on games before 1985. I mostly play the classics such as your typical vertical games from the late 70's to early 80's. Horizontal games, again mostly those from the early 80's.
Another thing I found out is that there was a Raspberry Pi B+ (Plus), which has the four USB ports. I have seen these for less than $30. Is that a significant improvement over the original Raspi B?
Basically I would like to revisit the Raspi as a base for an arcade cabinet, but only if I don't have that issue with the SD card corruption anymore. I figured the B+ or Raspi 2 should work better. But that is just a guess which is why I posted here in the first place.
Thanx,
Geo