Need to start all over again

[enchant]

Several years back, with the help of a MAME expert (who has since moved to parts unknown), I built a MAME cabinet system.  It's DOS-based, and appears to depend on specific sound card hardware.  The sound has since gone south, and getting replacement hardware for this ancient system (Pentium 75 Mhz, I think) is going to be difficult.

So I've got to start all over again.  My system was set up so that I could just power the thing on, and a couple minutes later, I had a front-end where I could use the joystick and buttons to select a game from a list.  Is something like that still possible?  I really don't want to have to depend on using an actual keyboard and mouse. But it would be nice to have some sort of plug-n-play so that I can use a PC with more recent hardware.

Can anyone point me in the right direction?  Thanks.

[Bobulus]

You can automate a more modern system pretty easily.

Easiest place to start is to check out the wiki entries on Fast Booting Windows and Hiding Windows.

If you were ever going to connect this thing to the net, I'd suggest going with windows XP, since patch support has been dropped for windows systems older than that.

[enchant]

Thanks for the info!  I don't have any plans to connect to the net, but I'm more familiar with XP than anything else, so that'd be my first choice.

[unclet]

I did this a long time ago but it might help you out using MALA as the frontend:

   http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=56010.0

If you just want to install Mame, then simply follow the Mame sections only.