Thanks for the link to that Asteroids cabinet restoration, what an awesome read. Makes me feel a bit better about all the work going into my relatively simple conversion.
I came up with a decent solution for my cocktail table: I made a Python script that tagged each game in my Attract Mode romlist that supports cocktail mode, so when scrolling through my games I get a little cocktail icon at top right if it supports cocktail mode. That way people know if the game supports cocktail mode, and it also made it easier to modify the DIP settings for all the games that need it:
Still a bear of a job though, so for the next person that comes this way, attached is my nvram folder zipped up with cocktail mode enabled for each of the 400 or so games in my collection that support it. I think that's all that's required, let me know if I'm missing something.
It also has demo sounds turned off for each of those games. I'm using Mame v0.175, not sure if these nvram files are version specific.
On my Ubuntu system, the nvram folder is ~/.mame/nvram, but I think on most platforms it's just a subfolder of the mame executable.
If it's version specific, maybe other people with built out cocktail cabinets can attach their nvram folder?
And attached are my Attract Mode romlists with cocktail mode added in the "extras" column. There's one made of just games that support cocktail mode, if anyone needs that list for any reason. I should say though, this isn't necessarily every MAME ROM that supports cocktail mode, it's just the ones that support it from my ROM collection (which is something like 7200 roms).
And let me know if anyone wants my Attract Mode theme from the screenshot. It's meant to look like the old Game Launcher front-end, if anyone remembers that.