Switching front ends?

[notbillcosby]

This question is potentially stupid or remarkably broad, so I apologize in advance.

I'm putting together a Mame cabinet. After being continually frustrated by certain games not working in certain versions of Mame on my other computers and having to keep 5 different versions sitting around and doing a guess and check each time I wanted a game to work, I opted to download a massive 19gb torrent with every conceivable game and a version of Mame that's all set up for everything, with screenshots and art and all the fixins. It's got a really nice frontend which makes control setup, video options, finding games, and everything else delightfully simple. However, it's a frontend with Windows users in mind, and of course I will want to put some sort of frontloader/frontend on here that will let my machine boot straight into Mame, as well as be read on an arcade monitor and be controlled with my joystick (I'm still fine with using a mouse for setup stuff, I just want to be able to find and select a game with the arcade controls.)

The question: how do I put a different frontend on the computer without losing the wide compatibility and screen shots that I have with my current one? All the roms in this torrent work with the Mame version that was included, which is awesome. I want to keep that! Id also really like Mame to be able to save high scores, if there is a version or add-on that will do that. Thanks in advance!

[lordnacho]

First step: pick a front end you like.  Then follow instructions on setting it up. Some are harder than others.