Help required re:usb booting

[Miskatonic]

Hello folks, first post and I have a simple (hopefully) question.

I've been looking all over the internet for stuff that would work but can't seem to find anything.

I have an acer aspire one netbook that I want to use as the guts inside an arcade machine playing only very old vertical monitor games.

It does not have a cd drive and I don't have access to an external one.

At the moment it's running windows 7 (slowly) but I could be persuaded to change to whatever is lightest best providing....

IT CAN BE RUN FROM USB !

I've been looking for a long time to find a premade USB booting os/mame frontend that actually works. Aside from windows 7 (which was without mame, it was just windows 7) I've had zero success in booting anything from USB. Can someone PLEASE tell me how to do this (well, point me in the direction of a program that will do this all automatically). I don't want page after page of winzip library files to compile or anything like that I just want something REALLY simple so I don't have to deal with any hassle and it'll just >WORK<

Is this possible ? It would be truly great if someone could help me out with this as I'm getting really annoyed by the myriad of (non-working) options that I'm discovering. "Oh, it's simple, just compile this into this, make these directories, open this command line tool, run this on that then run that on this then burn as an iso then use this to make the iso into a bootable usb" <NO> !!! Something simple must exist, surely ! I don't care what OS it is, as I said, the lighter the better and I want the frontend to just start as soon as the pc is turned on so I don't have to navigate windows first and can just treat the machine as if it were a multichoice arcade machine.

Thanks in advance for useful suggestions that lead me down the right path, I'm sure someone here must have the answer I seek !

[Miskatonic]

I'd be happy with something that can be installed from USB, too, so I don't always have to have the stick in the pc on boot to play the cabinet. Basically something that will WORK that is really, really simple whether or not it's installed or just runs from the stick.

I don't think this could be too much to ask but everything I find seems to have about 900 steps to the process, it's moronic that someone hasn't just aced this with something really, really obvious by now. Hopefully they have, though, and I have just failed at finding it. Let me know, thanks !

[EMDB]

You can create a bootable sticjk from any bootable Windows / Linux installation CD / DVD using WinUSB Maker: http://joshcellsoftwares.com/products/zotacwinusbmaker

[Miskatonic]

I'm looking for something that boots mame or boots an os that boots straight into mame itself. I already have windows 7 on usb. Getting an OS on USB is not a problem, I maybe didn't make myself clear enough in the initial post. I'm looking for a usb install/boot of mame so that I can start my cabinet up and not have to faff with windows/linux to get into the frontend. I want it just to "DO MAME" when it turns on.

[nitrogen_widget]

Toss this on a thumb drive with unetbootin.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/q19hvgk6phu76g1/pclinuxos_lxde_attractmode.iso?dl=0

Something I've been working on.
64 bit live Linux boots to attract mode and has Mame .157 no nag highscore patch with timothy lots CRT shader.
Shader works on my test system with classic games.
Celeron d 3 GHz and radeon 4650.
It has one of the free Mame Roms included.
It also has advanced Mame .106 for low power 64 bit systems.

It works for me but needs some updating and tweaking.

I'm building a low resource 32 bit version for older hardware also.

[05SRT4]

To launch my front end automatically when I boot up my machine I just put the Hyperspin launcher in the Windows start up folder.

I'm guessing you can do the same with the MAME or whatever front end your using.

Start - All Programs - Start up

Just create a shortcut of the mame.exe then paste it in there.

Now this doesn't Boot straight to it instantly Mine shows my desktop for about a second before launching the file.

[eds1275]

To launch my front end automatically when I boot up my machine I just put the Hyperspin launcher in the Windows start up folder.

that's what I do as well, but I hide all desktop icons and the start bar, and have the ""Winners Don't Use Drugs" or "Recycle It, Don't Trash It!" screen as my desktop so it shows that for a few seconds.

[Miskatonic]

Good call, folks, that's the kind of reply I was looking for. I will look into hyperspin, I think I had it ages ago but I need to have another look :-)

[05SRT4]

If you don't have Hyperspin you can still just create a shortcut of the .exe launch file (usually like mame.exe) then just place that in the start up folder.

[abispac]

for old machines, i use regular windows xp, after the first boot, i disable all the services i wont use, tweek the os to run faster, then install mame,hyperspin, and set up xp to boot directly on hyperspin, i dont use striped images of xp , as they tend to get problems. Also any usb boot method would be slow in performance compared to regular hardrive