Yeah, points taken. The thing is, the pc runs all the games fine with mame32 and auto rotates them perfectly. Remember, I'm just running REALLY old games like pac-man/tempest/dk etc etc. HOWEVER, it does seem to be a bit of a nightmare to get a frontend that works properly for these games. Each time I try one, the scaling/rendering is "off" and the games look crushed/compressed etc etc. Mame32 is perfect as I can (easily) tinker with options for each game until it sits right whereas I don't easily see a way to do this with any of the alternatives, they seem to rely on everything being perfect before you run them.
With regards to irotate etc, yes, I've tried that. I've tried 3 or 4 freeware rotation programs, none of which work. It just seems that it's not possible to rotate the screen on this netbook. I've also updated to the most recent intel chipset drivers and, again, the "rotate/portrait" option is missing from the graphics properties tab and the intel control panel. Nor do the normal windows hotkeys do it, which is most irksome. TBH, although it's ugly, if I could get mame32 running in portrait mode I would just use that as, as I said before, the games work flawlessly under that. Under everything else there seem to have been problems.
In the past I've run mame on 486 systems (lol) at 600mhz and suchlike, so I don't think this computer is underpowered. What I do think, however, is that it's an utter pissant that nearly went out the window yesterday at several points. It's just very uncooperative and, yes, perhaps it's time to rethink using it inside. I have a pi on the way that I was going to use for other stuff but I could definitely use that inside the build (it's certainly fast enough to run all the games I want on this system) and I also have another tower pc lying around, the guts of which could potentially be used. I need to check if it still works, it's old but it's quite powerful (I used to run tekken and suchlike on mame on it so a bunch of 80's vert games should be fine).
Will give this some more thought today. After yesterday I'm pretty much fed up of dealing with this netbook, it's really been nothing but an annoyance. It would be nice to be able to use it in the machine but I might consign it to another horizontal cab as for sure it can run old horizontal games no problem without feeling the need to display it's more asinine abilities.
I have enjoyed pretty much every aspect of my other builds up until this point, it's just this computer that's acting like an idiot and being non cooperative so, indeed, if I remove this from the equation things may become "fun" once more. We shall see.
I shall continue to report on my progress. There may yet be more swearing ;-)