I put in another memory module, and it helped some. I notice that certain arcades still bog down, notably one of the demo arcades (the one with the Moon Patrol sculpture in the lobby) and the Voodoo Science Lounge. Both bog down in specific areas, which leads me to believe it's only certain textures or lighting techniques causing the problem. That would support Howards post; my video card is the integrated NForce chipset which is equivalent to a GeForce 2, and shares memory with the system rather than having integrated memory.
Deniros' Dungeon of the Damned arcade works pretty well, and it has a ton of cabs.... there's one spot in the lower level near the driving cabs that gives me a similar problem (I think it's one of the textures around a door down there; it's not the driving cabinets themselves); when I hit that spot, I drop to a few frames per second until I push past it, and then it's fine. So I can use this arcade; most of the users of my cab are young girls, though, so I had to excise the scantily-clad women.
It still takes 3D Arcade several seconds to start to launch MAME, even with plenty of memory available. The DOS window opens up blank, the disk spins hard, and then about 5 seconds later the MAME startup kicks in. Returning to the arcade is fast, though.
I do notice that even with the extra memory, cylarcade will bog down and eventually crash to desktop; I'll solve that problem by setting up the control panel to use either list mode or fps mode only.
One last little issue is that one of my buttons (the one I want to use to swap between game lists) is mapped to the NumPad 5 key, which I can't read in 3D Arcade without turning Num Lock on, so I'll need to pull my keyboard hack out and rewire that key...
Otherwise, this is a pretty sharp piece of work!
--Chris