"Once you wipe that hard drive you'll have started down a long road with no return."
Yup. Thats precisely why I was apprehensive to do that. Though I understand some of this stuff I seriously was doubting my ability to build the thing up from scratch.
That being said, I opted to just get the latest version of MAME and after installing that I re-installed everything else, sort of a last ditch effort. And what d'ya know? Working! I find it strange that the frontend was crashing and now that I installed a newer MAME it is fine. Granted some games still take a long time to load, but I'm not complaining. I am guessing this is more an issue of RAM then anything else, so thats the next step.
Resolved the sound card issue as well by simply putting the card in another slot and again, reinstalling the driver. All these fixes seemed to obvious, I was sure it was hardware or scripting(?) problem, which is where my already limited knowledge ends. Im happy everything is working, now I just need to figure out how to add ROMS. Any help guys?
I put a few from my laptop in the C>MAME>ROM folder but MAMEWah would not find them. Hmmm. ALot of the games I have currently on the cabinet are a little bo-bo and off center, so I would like to put some of my laptop ones on.
Either way, thanks guys for all the help and sorry to be "that guy with those questions". Take care
Regards