I apologize if this has already been covered; did a search and went back a few months and didn't see anything on it.
Currently, I'm getting ready to kick off my MAME project after helping a friend with his.
He had a gutted police trainer with a 29" monitor installed. We kept the monitor and bought an IPAC2, a VGA Passthrough Cable (also from UltimArc.com), and popped in some controls from Happs.
Controls work great. I think the Blue and Red are switched on the passthrough cable, that's an easy enough fix. Games play ok, but they take an absurdly long time to load.
So, for the front end, we're using ArcadeOS (because of it's excellent arcade monitor support) on MS-DOS 7.1.
We're not super happy with ArcadeOS, mainly because he has kids and it's a very "bland" presentation. We also can't get the screenshots to show correctly (yes they're there, and the flag is set on in the config file).
I'm also not too sure about MS-DOS 7.1 because we're having a hell of a time getting the sound to work (it currently does not) and it doesn't seem to be using memory properly because it takes 5 minutes to even load a BurgerTime ROM set (on a 512MB, 800 MHz PIII)
Now I haven't worked with him to see if MEMMAKER is still supported in 7.1, or if we need to manually do RAM configuration via EMM386 so we're still kind of virgin on the OS rollout (it's been many years since I've had to do native DOS configurations); so that might be an easy fix.
What I'm getting to is if anyone has any recommendations for OS / MAME Front End combos. While I don't care so much for the bells and whistles, it would be nice to have a nice DOS front end that mimics some of the better presentation features of MAME32 or AdvanceMAME.
Also seeing anyone has any good advice for a sound card with known good DOS 7.1 drivers.
Thanks in advance for any help you guys can provide.