Hi all,

I'm in planning stages of building my own Arcade bartop. I've looked into various options for the internals and having a cheap (not to mention small) Pi inside definitely sounds like a great solution. Though computer-savvy enough on Windows, I'm not at all at home with Linux distros (other than whatever runs my Android of course) so I'm glad that something such as this implementation exists.

I haven't bought my Pi yet since I'm still gathering information. I'm already aware the Raspberry Pi isn't exactly a workhorse game box, but I'm most interested in first half 80s games anyway so I should be safe.

I wish to create a pretty monolithic arcade feel. As such, I'd like the emulator to start up quickly and preferably silent. A configurable splash is acceptable (even cool), but the usual blurb of startup messages that appears when starting a Linux distro isn't. Recompiling and rebuilding a custom Linux distro is way out of my league in terms of expertise and time, but I would be fine with editing startup scripts if that can do the the tricks I want it to do.

If I understand it well PiMame sets out to be a full distribution to get started (jay!). I was wondering in how it has been configured for fast and silent booting, or if you can change things to do that yourself. I've seen a demonstration video or two but both are well past the boot sequence and just showing the game. Any clues?