What is the BEST self-booting MAME front end to use in an arcade cabinet???

LeeB99

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What is the BEST self-booting MAME front end to use in an arcade cabinet???

I have a dedicated Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition Hyperfighting which I outfitted with a PC based system that I bought around 2004 from Excellentcom.net

It works fine and all, but the front end that it uses is a proprietary system (called KIVAII) and unfortunately, I have yet to figure out how to customize the .cfg settings to get a better quality sound output from the system. Since it came set up to use a standard jamma harness with a couple of extra buttons added near the bottom of the jamma harness, the settings are for mono output and (unfortunately) at a low audio bitrate. On games with more complex audio, this causes the sound to become distorted. I have hooked up some high power (quality) PC speakers with subwoofer directly into the PC board's audio output jack. Although it sounds much better than going through the original speaker, the "quality" of the sound is obviously held back through the low bitrate configuration settings.

I have tried tweaking the .cfg settings, but it didn't change the audio bitrate. I have managed to add a number of games that were not originally included on the hard drive, but even when I edited the individual games' .cfg file ahead of time, it still operates globally at the low audio quality.

What I would like to do is start over with a completely different hard drive, and use a newer/better frontend, so that I can customize it and get the best results. This will also allow me to (possibly) take advantage of some newer games that may have been added to mame since the build that is currently in there is (obviously) older. In the past, I had tried to clone the original drive, but the cloned drive will not boot the board. And this is why it would be ideal to use an all-new frontend on a different hard drive.

This frontend would need to be setup to output resolutions and refresh rates that are compatible with the 25" arcade monitor that is in the cabinet. Hopefully, there is a program that I can use that will automatically configure the frontend on to a hard drive that you plug up to a PC and automatically configure the drive to "autoboot" right into the menu. Anyone know what I should use??? Thanks...

Lee
 
Any front end you put in your Startup folder in Windows will do that.
If you're using XP or 98, there are other ways to hide or "skin" the operating system so that it doesn't look like a PC booting. You can run front ends as a shell to autostart them too, but I've never done that.

For something fast and simple, I'd recommend either MaLa or Atomic FE.
 
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