You are in mame h8tr territory here on klov! I LOVE mame, I make sweet ass mame conversions without hacking up control panels. I go with what the cabinet wants to be. A trackball cabinet stays as a trackball cabinet...What peeps really dispise is FRANKENPANELS. CP's that try to play too many different games with too many different controls.
I have seen mame cabinets that blow away multiboard conversions any day. And multicading a cabinet is no better than maming it, it just makes it easier to sell, that's all. So peeps here that slam mame and then make nasty multicades are worse than peeps trying to mame a cabinet. Mame tends to be more accurate than the multiboards. I have to say though, some peeps here on klov just do not have the technical know how to build a mame from scratch, they just don't understand it all and there's a lot to know. If you think the arcadesd is running anything other than mame, you are kidding yourself.