simplest frontend for launching a dozen Linux commands?

[JoeStrout]

My boys and I are building an RPi-based mini-arcade machine (based on an iCade cabinet and an IPAC joystick).  Actually, we had this all working nicely with a Mac Mini hanging out the back, but it looked ghetto, and now we want to package it all nice and neat based on the much smaller RPi.

We are going to have fewer than a dozen games — we believe in the "less is more" philosophy on these things.  We have the command-line command to launch each one exactly the way we want it.  Now we just need a frontend.

I see that a lot of people use AdvMENU, but when we looked at that — oi, it seems like we're going to be fighting it every step of the way.  It wants to auto-discover ROMs, and divide them up by emulator, and construct the command line out of a bunch of different parts, specified in different places, some of them outside my control.

All I want is to display a dozen images, which the user can cycle through with the joystick, and when they smack a button, it executes the Linux command I specify in a config file.  Is there such a thing?

If not, and we resort to writing it ourselves, what would you recommend — pygame?  Pi3D?  Something else?  (I'm not a huge fan of Python anymore, but our options on RPi are pretty limited, and it's not like this will be a complex program.)

Or should we just suck it up and wrestle AdvMENU into submission?