After many years away, I'm becoming active again - sparked in part by the death of my PC in my still unfinished (after over a decade - never get a cabinet working before finishing the artwork!) cabinet. I've been looking through the forums to try to catch up on what I've missed and I'm finding it all a little overwhelming.
Is there a thread that somebody can recommend that outlines the current state of play, or can somebody give me an overview what I should be looking for in the way of hardware and software, please? I'm only interested in the classics (to the mid-1980s) to run on my upright with one set of controls and an iPac. I can see that there are a few different emulators that didn't exist back then (my dead PC was running AdvanceMAME on XP), but I'm not really clear what is best.
For the era of arcade emulation I'm interested in, what sort of PC/OS would I now need? I'm planning on changing the monitor to an old 20" HP 1600x1200 to give me as much screen real estate as possible, without needing to worry about rotating, but would like to use as many visual effects to imitate the CRT effect (I remember these existed back then but as I was using a 15KHz CRT I wasn't fussed about them, so they must have come some way since).
On the controller side, is Ultimarc still the king? I'm keen to upgrade my CP with a 4/8 switching joystick to make the cabinet as flexible as possible (it was configured for vertical 4-way previously, but in the intervening years, life has changed a bit, and I no longer have the space or time for a bunch of different machines).
Anything else I ought to know?
Cheers!