Not a problem. It's been a while since I set it up (since I'm just using an image of the first one), but I'll see what I can do to elaborate.
First I installed the CF card as a hard drive using the CD/IDE adapter. It's then registered as a 128MB hard drive. It's compact, it's solid-state, and it's silent. What more could you want in an arcade machine?
From there you can work with it as if it were any other hard drive. Setting it up follows the same basic steps as any MAME installation:
1.) install the OS (FreeDOS)
2.) install the emulator (AdvanceMAME)
3.) install the frontend (GameLauncher)
4.) tweak for performance (RAM disk)
5.) wrap it up (autoexec.bat)
I installed FreeDOS on it. You download a bootable CD image from
FreeDOS.org and burn it. Make sure you get the minimal "fbasecd" installation. All the bells and whistles take up unneeded space. It will guide you through the installation process.
After that was all installed, I got to work with getting MAME running. I went with AdvanceMAME since it's very tweakable in DOS and allows the use of onboard audio controllers (which is handy for those of us without Sound Blasters). I won't go into the details of setting it up.
Once I got the emulator working reliably, I installed the frontend. I chose GameLauncher as the frontend. I got that set up and going. Again, I won't go into details.
Now here's the tricky part - the part you're probably most interested in hearing. I editted my autoexec.bat file so that it would do a few things for me. First I got it to launch GameLauncher at startup.
That's easy enough, but it was taking the better part of a minute to load a simple game. Why? Because DOS sucks with memory management. Solution? Create a RAM disk! A RAM disk basically builds a partition in RAM and assigns it a drive letter so that it can be treated as a regular hard drive. Since RAM is so much faster than the hard drive, it makes everything on the RAM disk faster to execute - MUCH faster. I believe I designated my RAM drive to be 64MB since that's half of my total RAM and assigned it a drive letter of "x:", but don't quote me.
Anyways, once I had the RAM disk working, I updated my autoexec.bat to reflect those changes. From there, it's all about leveraging the RAM disk. The more you copy onto the RAM disk at startup, the slower your startup process takes. That's not cool for an arcade machine when people expect "instant-on" capability. All you really need to move is the executables and their config files. The ROMs can stay on the CF card. So then you update your autoexec.bat file again to set up the copy process at startup.
If you don't care about game saves, you're done. If you do care about game saves, make sure they're maintained on the CF card and not on the RAM disk. Otherwise you'll lose them everytime you shut the computer down. Any config changes need to also be performed on the CF card if you want tohem to persist.
TADA! I hope that was more helpful than it was confusing. If you absolutely need more info, I can probably snag a copy of my autoexec.bat and config.sys files for your review.
For those people who anticipate having trouble setting up something in DOS, I recommend checking the following thread:
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=58809.0spystyle has built a DOS installation disk that looks very promising. Though I prefer to do it myself to get it just the way I want it, his method seems to work. I can't promise a fool-proof installation, but I can tell you it's a good spring board.