Help setting up MAME on new cab< Pleeeeese!

[rackoon]

OK, Let me start with putting out there that I insatlled MAME 32 three years ago, with a lot of help from this forum and began to built two cabinets. One is finaly done and the other is in parts beacuse I spent all my time playing games with the monitor on the floor and the wiring all over the office. (I used to build funiture for a living not computers, so my cabs look awsome but the rest is up in the air.

Regardless, I just finshed a badass cab and need to get it up and running. I tried to follow the instructions from MAMEWORLD but ended up playing with winwar for hours. Then I went to YOUTUBE and found somthing like what I did before, but I just have no Idea where I started.

I have all roms on my desktop for MAME 109 and I downloded MAME 109, WINrar and MAME 109 to match my roms.
MY end result that I am looking for is a system that works with arcade maximus. Several years ago I dowloaded MAME and I gve me a cab icon now I jsut got a stack of books icon. 
AAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[mvsfan]

You need to find yourself a good stable release of mame, or mame 32.

Then find a good frontend to lay on top of that and configure to your liking. then lay everything on to a big sdhc card and lock it. If your creative and inventive, look into locking the entire windows system except for files that have to be writable in order for the os to function, and make sure to back those initial ram files up to non writable media in order to restore it later . otherwise your just shooting in the dark, and you can almost guarantee that somewhere down the line your system will become unreliable and unstable and perhaps prone to crashing because of viruses or other issues.

[Jack Burton]

I think if you are having this much trouble in the beginning you need to increase your general knowledge of computers.

One of those computer for dummies books or sites would probably do the most good.

[TOK]

I think that "stack of books" icon is a RAR'd file.

I'm having trouble figuring out exactly whats going on from your comments.
Create a MAME folder and install MAME 109 to it. It will create various subfolders, one of which will be called ROMS. All of your games go in there, and they stay zipped.

I think most front ends are pretty flexible. I use MaLa and just put it in its own folder outside of MAME. When you start it up, it asks you to point it to the folders/files you need. In this example it'd be MAME/MAME.EXE and the ROMS folder would be MAME/ROMS.

If you're getting stuff from some ---smurfy--- torrent thats RAR'ing files that are already zipped, it might be what is adding to your confusion.

[Franco B]

I seem to remember installing Mame32 a long time a go and I think that pile of books is something like an auto .7z installer.

IIRC once you install/unzip that it should extract all of the files/folders and you should be able to access the folders and the mame32.exe etc