Emulator choice and sample Advancemenu configuration file

Emulators

My emulator choices were constrained by a couple of things. Firstly, I had downloaded a heap of ROMs (from a disk put out in 1998!) so they needed to work with them. Secondly, there aren't that many emulators for Linux (especially for NeoGeo!). 

I was considering getting Space Ace and Dragon's Lair, old school laser disc games, but I haven't added them yet. I have the ROM files, but not the video files. It could be fun creating a video disc game of my own ( there are editors out there, I don't think it would be hard) but i lack the time and inclination at the moment.-Daphne is the emulator for those games. Here is how to get it to work with Advancemenu

For my other ROMs, there are other emulators which I could have used, especially for the NES, which has quite a variety, but as I said before, these are the ones which worked with my roms. 

So I have: 

Gens for Sega Megadrive (aka Genesis)

Osmose for Sega Master System

MAME for arcade machines

fceux for NES games

Gngeo for Neo Geo games

Frontends

I'm using this in a cabinet, with a heap of roms and emulators all mixed together, so I need a frontend to launch the different games, and keep everything organised. I've opted for Advancemenu, though there are loads of other frontends (a couple of lists are here and here) which are up to the task. Advancemenu can display the games how I want (a list on the left, screenshot on the right), and works with all of the emulators I want to use. Effectively, you could use advancemenu as a launcher for just about anything - movies, music, whatever - not just games.

Configuration files

Advancemenu (download my config here, includes comments)

My Advance menuconfig has the following features:

*Multiple emulators, with one emulator per screen.

*Custom keys mapped to page through ROM lists (one emulator per page).

*A 'utility' section, for shutdowns, restarts and verifying mame roms.

*Preview screenshots of games.

*8bit tunes as background music for the menu.

The music directory and mame roms directories are on a usb stick, which gets loaded when the operating system starts up.  I used ls-by-uuid to get the uuid of the usb stick, and added the following line to my /etc/fstab to load it where I wanted each time:

 UUID=dac3b911-d2e7-462d-b0cf-d19aa4d1fa48 /Roms/MAME/ fat32  auto  0       0

Utility directory

This has 3 scripts, one to shutdown the computer, one to restart the computer, and one to verify the mame roms. To do the shutdown and restarts, I had to add the user running Advancemenu to /etc/shutdown.allow.

Some configuration tips

You can add BIOS files to emulators, so they can run more games, for example adding the Naomi BIOS to MAME allows you to play Naomi based games. I put them in a seperate BIOS folder, and add that to the ROM search path in the emulator config file. That way the emulator can read the file, but Advancemenu doesn't add the BIOS files to its menu.  

All of the emulators I've used allow for multiple paths to the files.