ArcadeOS 2.52

This frontend is very powerful but has its weaknesses (mainly the one of not being supported any longer). Although there is quite a lot of documentation some options should have been explained better. Here is a list of things I haven't yet cleared:

• Once you have taken screenshots in a certain orientation, it is not possible to rotate the screenshots to a new orientation. This happened to me when I rotated my monitor from rol to ror and changed the ArcadeOS configuration
  ArcadeOS needs MAME to function properly. At least the MAMEPATH etc. variables cannot be left empty. I circumvented this by filling the variables with the vantage data. I then ignored all the stuff for emulator 1(=MAME by default) and used vantage as emulator2.
• when screenshot displaying was activated but no shot was available for the selected game, the frontend froze for a few seconds. Make sure all your games have a screenshot.
• The standard backdrop did not display when no game-specific shot was available.
• The 3D screensaver is buggy and terminates after a few minutes. Luckily it seems to be an external program so you just return to the menu.
• I did not get the difference between "moving" and "running" for the screenshots. Update: "running" mode means that there is a shorter interval between highlighting the next game. Just press and hold the up/down key. For slower PCs disable displaying screenshots in running mode.
  

Maybe someone can help me with these issues because I am sure some of the described problems were caused by own ignorance.

The real advantage of ArcadeOS lies in the ability to wrap older emulators with keyboard remapping and display adjusting.

If you want to use a menu for NTSC||PAL output better use AdvanceMenu as it's more modular and easier to configure.

VAntAGE 1.12

A very nice and fast emulator. It's easy to configure and is perfectly suited for a cab with a vertical monitor when using a low-end PC.

working / non-working ROMS:

According to the latest VAntAGE build (1.12) there is support for 91 games (Here's a copy of the -listshort output: vanlist.txt ). The games which I have found to be non-working are:

This leaves 85 working games. See the PC2JAMMA page and the VAntAGE source for more info. Don't expect any more updates.

The following archive contains all the ROMs for VAntAGE 1.12, divided by working and non-working: vanroms.rar (2.3 Mb)

The emulator and the sound samples can be download from PC2JAMMA

Screenshot pack for ArcadeOS

For those of you that are too lazy to take the screenshots by themselves, here's an archive that contains all VAntAGE screenshots: vanshots.rar (250 Kb)

All these shots are in the ror orientation, so if you plan to use them in a rol configuration you have to rotate the files 180° with a program that supports batch-editing like PSP, etc.

Speed:

The VAntAGE authors claims (carefully) that games run very fast even on a 486 66Mhz. I haven't found this to be perfectly true and so I got me a Pentium 100 Mhz. This system works good with most of the games except 1942, 1943, 1943 Kai and Gunsmoke. These games definitely are too slow for authentic gameplay. I am not sure if the precalculating option makes the loading really faster.

Setup:

If you want the emulator to save your custom key definitions you first have to create a directory called "KEYS" in the VAntAGE folder. Do this immediately after unpacking the archive then the default files will be generated when launching VAntAGE for the first time. I guess someone forgot to put this directory into the original archive - this is just a small flaw however.

Another small bug is the fact that the programs terminates with an error message if the rom name is omitted when starting on pure command line.