I am a little confused from your post. You mention Raspicade. Are you wanting to get Raspicade working or are you interested in running PiPlay?

I can't help you with Raspicade, but I have spent a couple of months getting PiPlay to run successfully in Vertical mode. I haven't built a cabinet yet, but all my prototyping works well now. I have the Pi, monitor, and speakers all plugged into a power-strip. When I flip the power-strip on it all boots up directly into PiPlay. I have all the other emulators removed from the menu screen with only MAME4All visible. There are guides on this forum to have it boot directly into MAME4All. I haven't done it, but it seems fairly straight forward.

At least from my experience and a couple of others, Vertical mode creates a lot of challenges that don't manifest themselves in Horizontal mode. I have a theory for this. It's a fact that running with the screen rotated 90 or 270 degrees requires a lot more processing than in 0 or 180 degrees, because it has to emulate the entire output. My theory is that there is barely enough processing power left to run emulation of the games. How I have seen this manifest itself is primarily with audio. I've seen both laggy and cracking audio. It varies from game to game, but Donkey Kong is my test game as the audio was horrible in vertical mode.

Here are a few critical elements I have found for success:

Run in turbo mode (overclocked)

Memory split 256/256

Use a USB Sound Card - this takes the audio processing off the Pi. This will not run plug and play with MAME4All it will crash every time. There is a special file you need to add with some code in it. I posted the solution on this site. Took me a week to figure this out.

You will have to manually set the HDMI Group and Mode. By dumb luck, I got everything working, then switched monitors and the audio went to crap again! I couldn't believe it, but testing confirmed it. Here is my theory. There is a native resolution for MAME4All. If your monitor default settings are too far off from that, it will take more processing power from the Pi and the audio will crap out. By manually setting the HDMI Group and Mode to something closer to the native MAME4All resolution, the problem goes away. I can't tell you what to set it at, because it will vary from monitor to monitor get the best combination of video resolution and functional audio. I proved this out on 2 different monitors.

Those are the main issues and solutions I've found. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.

I think there are two ways to get vertical to work:

1. change boot settings for your Pi
Change the config.txt file so your Pi will boot vertically. For me this didn't work out that great because AdvanceMame and all the games started up in this really small vertical part of the screen, not using the whole screen.

2. change settings of AdvanceMame to vertical
This works perfectly for the games, but I only have it working in AdvanceMame. The Pi still boots in horizontal mode, but as soon as the games start, they use the full monitor in vertical mode. I still haven't figured out how to start up AdvanceMame in vertical mode, I need to put it in vertical mode manually for now.

With option #2 I didn't experience any lag or sound problems, the older '80 games run fine but the heavier games (Outrun for example) have too much lag to play.

Hi,
I've done this using the moebious version of raspbian.
All CLI.
It boots up horizontally into advmenu rotated for vertical only games.
Then it calls up mame4all which is set to run rotated also in the config files.
I decided since i wanted to just play vertical classics that mame4all was just fine and with the correct scale settings looked really good on an LCD panel with scanlines.

It works just fine.
I found out rotating the pi's display caused a lot of overhead also.

The only issue I have is the screen shots in advmenu are squished to the horizontal aspect.

I have the .img file on my dropbox if anyone was interested in checking it out.
It's very basic though.
No gui and everything was done via SSH & FTP.

no i'm waiting for my rpi2 to come in so I can try Wah!cade for my front end.

It installed fine on my rpi1 b but ran dog slow.
It should run fine on the quadcore rpi.

PM sent.

Mame4all has a config script also.
A lot of the info for it is in the thread on the RPI forums.