consoles in a box?

[daywane]

I could not think of a better name off hand. (stolen from arcade in box) I always wanted one !
I want to build  A home intertainment system
I have 1/2 of what I need. (pc hardware at least)
I want to clear out my living room of all my game systems and build a box for emus. joysticks will come from here http://www.sealiecomputing.com/retrozone/retropadatari.html
still need a Mother board to use my 1.2 gig celeron cpu
I have 256megs 168 pin memeory and 40 gig hard drive
windows xp ( I could use 98se but then I could not burn dvd with it)

question 1) all my emus are windows based ( no front ends) any ideas how to change this ( I have tried command line MAME many times and never got a darn thing to work     )

question 2 : I found a neet program once ( did not work in windows me) It showed your console and mame Icon in a circle and your joystick moved the console you wanted  to the first in line spot and started that emu program. very cool.
any links to this program? I lost it. has it been updated any?

I want this to be a vary simple set up for kids to play with out me having to explane every move more than a few 100 times   I plan on all controlls being usb

I will probably make a custom box. small as I can make it.
any one done something like this I would like to see some of your work please.

[abrannan]

1. Change your EMUs to command line, Front-end friendly emulators.  DO some searches on this site for the recommended lsit of emus.

2. Download and learn to configure one of the popular front-ends (check the Software forum) they'll all support what you're trying to do. (Multiple emulators from one front-end)

3. Remember that the simpler you want the end result to be, the more time and effort you'll have to put in when putting the thing together.