Limiting game selection for kids

[toadman]

Hey everyone. I'm a UNIX guy, but I'm pretty new to the whole MAME world, so go easy on me =)

I'm wanting to build a cabinet for both my own use and also for the use of my kids. However, they're young enough that I don't want them to have access to all of the games that I do.

Right now, I'm thinking I'm going to run this on Fedora/GNOME, and that I could just have different user accounts for "restricted" and "unrestricted" play. I could control which ROMs the restricted user would have access to by placing them in that user's .xmame/roms directory. For now, I'll manually decide which ROMs the restricted user can play. This part seems pretty straightforward.

What I'm struggling with is the login aspect of it. Ideally, to login as the restricted user, you would just walk up to the box and press start or something. I wonder if I could make Fedora login as the guest user when you enter no username.

And then maybe for the unrestricted user, you have to enter a username and password using the arcade controls. Maybe it could be UUDDLRLRBA-Start  

Seriously, though, has anyone ever thought about something like this? I would prefer a Linux solution, but if there's something for Windows that would accomplish this better, I'd be open to that as well.

TIA,

[screaming]

  Hey there.. Welcome!

What I'm struggling with is the login aspect of it. Ideally, to login as the restricted user, you would just walk up to the box and press start or something. I wonder if I could make Fedora login as the guest user when you enter no username.

  You can.

And then maybe for the unrestricted user, you have to enter a username and password using the arcade controls. Maybe it could be UUDDLRLRBA-Start  

  Since button and joystick movements translate into keypresses on a keyboard, this is very possible  Personally, I like the feel of UDUDLRLRBABAStart *g*

Seriously, though, has anyone ever thought about something like this? I would prefer a Linux solution, but if there's something for Windows that would accomplish this better, I'd be open to that as well.

  The arcade emulator business is mainly a Windows world with most of the more featured frontends being based on DirectX and being written in VB.

  A couple frontends support Linux, but you'll find that only a select few people on here have experience running them (not me).   Check out here for an incomplete list of frontends and their supported operating systems.

  MAMEWAH (Windows based) used to have the ability to 'unlock' certain games or something, but I've never used that feature.

   ..and that's pretty much the extent of my knowledge on the subject.

-Steve

[toadman]

I've played around with AdvanceMENU, which isn't on that list, and it seems to work fine. I would also like to do some mp3 jukebox functionality with this machine, so I'm looking for something that will let me do that with keyboard (joystick) navigation as well.

I'm actually considering MythTV for my frontend. I haven't actually used it yet, but it has a lot of what I'm looking for:

 - doesn't look like a computer program
 - keyboard (joystick) navigation
 - MP3 playing
 - MAME launcher
 - lots of other cool stuff that I might include as well

It seems a little strange to use PVR software and not use the PVR part, but it's looking like the best option. Anyone have any experience using MythTV in a cabinet before?