
Hi everyone. I have just recently obtained a strong desire to build my own arcade machine after coming in possession of two broken machines (mortal kombat 2 and Toki). I spent hours tinkering with these machines to no avail when I decided to gut the better of the two cabinets and build my own machine. That's when things became difficult.
I know a good amount about computer hardware and I have all the buttons and wires I need from the old machines, plus I have ordered the ipac2. I also have used emulators in the past and learned a bit about MAMEUI recently. This is where I am stuck. I have no idea how frontends work nor do I know how to run DOS. I basically want to be able to turn on the machine and be greeted with a menu screen with a list of arcade games which I can navigate with the joystick (no mouse or keyboard) If at all possible, I would like to also be able to play other emulators on the machine, but that is not priority for my first machine. I have heard a little bit about MaLa, but I dont know where to begin.
Basically any advice would be great or any references to helpful web pages would also be appreciated. thanks everyone.