New arcade cabinet! - which mame and frontend the best ?

[vettetek]

Ok,
Ive been dicking around with advmame and arcadeos for a couple weeks now on my athelon xp 1900 with 512 megs of ram, a sb live and aati rage pro 2. I have finally gotten past all my other problems with rom lists and display problems. The cabinet has a 34" sharp image monitor in it that looks absolutely awesome. The problems Im having is no matter what i set in the cfg and rc files, I cant get rid of the "nag" screens. Also, and more importantly It takes like 25 seconds to load a rom. I heard its because of my memory allocations. I also heard Its not best to use a "modern" system with dos mame.
So BOTTOM line is that I want something to utilise my hardwares power, and still be able to run my arcade monitor like advmame does.
Is mamewha the answer running in a shell under XP? Which mame would i use to get the correct outputs to the monitor? Or would I be better to configure the memory better at startup in dos with the setup I have
PLEASE HELP!
thanks!!
~V

[SirPoonga]

First off, you are going to have to play around with frontends and mames to see what you like.

Second, there is going to be a load time, mame loads the rom into memory, also it reads and parses several files.

To get rid of most of the OK screens in your mame.ini file enable skip_disclaimer and skip_gameinfo.

[vettetek]

Thanks,
Its not really a matter of what I like versus what works the best. I can run mame32 on my winxp based system, and the roms load instantaniously. I thought by running a dedicated machine with just the FE and a version of MAME, it would be even faster. What I failed to think of is that dos doesnt manage memory like windows, and thus the full amount of my memory may be useless. Im basically trying to figure out how to make a windows based system - with a shell JUST for the FE and run a version of mame - fast is it can load - on a arcade monitor at 15khz. I know it may be alot to ask, but the "beauty" of the front end is my last concern. I guess I just want the most arcade "FEEL" as I can get, and wonder if anyone else is running a similar setup that I could work from.
Thanks for the advice for disabling the nag screens - ill look into that!
~V

[bryan1945]

Hi, new here.

You can alter how DOS programs run under Windows, including memory usage.  Right click on the program and pick properties, then the Memory tab.  I don't know how mame uses memory, so I can't give a certain value, but you can try changing the values (the default I believe is "Auto") to a large value.  This might help.

[SirPoonga]

Actually, mame32 loads in about the same time BUT it masks it.  Typical programming trick for making something appear to be faster.

I'd suggest getting windows 98 can replacing the shell in the win.ini file with the frontend.

[Bill Mote]

I loaded a test machine yesterday with XP.  I set MAME32 to the shell (search for "winlogin" in the registry).  Once it booted I set all the directories and removed the toolbar, status bar, etc.  Hit F11 to make it full screen.  After a quick reboot my system boots to XP with MAME32 full screen and it's the *only* thing running!

dot

[vettetek]

Dot,
Thats cool! But the thing is - are you running this in an arcade monitor? If so, how are you setting up the refresh rates and resolutions on it? ADVMAME has that nice configreation utility to achieve that. How can that be done in XP?
(anyone can answer that as well)
~V