Arcade Cabinet Upgrade - Looking for input

[joshlindem]

Wow.. it's been a while since I used this message board. About 15 years ago, I was gifted the remnants of an original arcade cabinet. It had the marquee, controls and coin slot intact.  I pulled out all the original wiring\speakers\lights and replaced it with a basic desktop computer running DOS+ MAME w/17" monitor. Wired in some LED lights and computer speakers and used an IPAC Ultimarc board to connect the arcade controls to the computer. Much of that was from the help of users on this board.

Flash forward to now, and I'm relooking at my cabinet. It's great. still works and still fun to play. In the time that we've had it, we've had to move twice and it's a "beast". It's heavy, and large. I'm looking to rebuild everything. Maybe see about acquiring a smaller cabinet. (would love separate input on this)

I've purchased a Rasberry Pi 5. Got it up and running and then installed RetroPie. And now I feel like I'm starting all over again from scratch. Albeit a little more confused this time around. I'm a little confused on how to go about getting MAME or AdvancedMAME installed on the Pi5. Roms seemed fairly straight forward.
I believe I'm correct that I need to upgrade the current i-PAC (PS2) to the newer i-PAC2 (USB) and the cabinet itself should work the same.

Am I correct in thinking that all the controls should operate the same from the old to the new?

Definitely lots of info to go through here

[joshlindem]

the old board